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Significant expansion of the Calaveras Dam, and increasing the amount of water stored behind it, runs up against the fact that the Calaveras Reservoir sits on the Hayward earthquake fault. The more water impounded there, the more that would flood surrounding Alameda and Santa Clara counties in the event of a disastrous earthquake.
Then there's the issue of San Francisco's historical political disdain for the idea of removing what many call the city's civic jewel. When Interior Secretary Don Hodel in 1987 undertook a campaign to dismantle O'Shaughnessy Dam, then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein flew to Washington and battled ferociously to halt the project.
"What more fun than for a Republican to toss a grenade into a Democratic city," Klein says.
The San Francisco City Attorney's Office went to work, producing legal theories and cost estimates on how San Francisco might be made whole if the federal government forced the dismantling of the dam. "They generated all sorts of papers, estimates, and legal theories, where [the federal government would] have to buy the city out from under $2 billion to $5 billion in investments in Hetch Hetchy," Klein recalls.
That's $5 billion in 1987 dollars.
Standing atop O'Shaughnessy Dam, next to the drinking fountain there that spouts pristine, granite-filtered Hetch Hetchy water, and gazing across the smooth lake's surface to the cliffs on either side of Wapama Falls, it's hard not to get a case of the willies. Of all the monuments to civic might that I've seen -- skyscrapers, bridges, freeway cloverleafs -- none offers as poignant an illustration of the dominion a few city fathers can have over nature as that quiet, isolated reservoir. I didn't spend years in the Bancroft Library with George Miller, but I've seen sepia photographs of tall grass meadows, a meandering Sierra Nevada stream, scattered conifer groves, interrupted by thousand-foot veined granite terraces, and felt a thrill.
When I first heard Adam Werbach say he believes draining Hetch Hetchy is "inevitable," it sounded as if he were incanting a strain of environmental mysticism. After looking at old photographs for this story and recollecting my afternoon four years ago spent staring at the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, I realize Werbach is stating a simple, logical imperative derived from viewing Michael O'Shaughnessy's legacy.
But the minute one leaves the dam and makes one's way back alongside Hetch Hetchy's aqueducts and pipelines and into California's Central Valley, the simple logic muddles. Proponents of a Hetch Hetchy restoration posit the overturning of a 1913 law that guarantees San Francisco certain rights to Sierra Nevada water. But reasonable people hold a legitimate fear that removing this law would force San Francisco to vie for water on equal footing with other California municipalities. Hetch Hetchy restorationists propose expanding downstream storage facilities, allowing the O'Shaughnessy Dam to be dismantled. Yet some environmentalists believe, reasonably, that such a move would only provide more water to communities outside San Francisco, further enabling the sprawl development that every year ruins several Hetch Hetchys' worth of natural habitat.
Still, it's almost impossible not to feel inspired by George Miller, John Muir, and Adam Werbach's strain of aesthetically motivated environmentalism, which focuses on preserving the most physically beautiful portions of the natural world. After all, it should be possible to devise a Hetch Hetchy restoration plan with few adverse environmental side effects, and with little financial harm to San Francisco, as long as the massive engineering and political problems a restoration would entail were dealt with straightforwardly.
Whether restoring Hetch Hetchy Valley costs $2 billion or $10 billion, it's really not a large amount in federal budget terms. San Francisco's currently constructing a 15-block subway tunnel that will likely cost around $1 billion. What's a few billion more to restore one of America's greatest natural treasures?
After all, "spending money is always good politics," Werbach wryly notes.
The real challenge for San Francisco, and its powerful congressional delegation, is to see the true value in restoring one of the most beautiful places in the universe, in spite of the upcoming Environmental Defense campaign.
