Hetch Hetchy - is the reservoir half-emptied or half-full?

Report shows restoration feasible, but opponents desperately spinning it the other way

The state has released its long-awaited report on whether it's feasible to restore the Hetch Hetchy Valley, but what does the report show? If you read different newspapers, you may hardly believe they're talking about the same report with the same conclusions.

Sierra Club activists have not forgotten our first major environmental defeat: the damming of the magnificent Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park. We held off government engineers and San Francisco leaders for almost five years, but in 1913 Woodrow Wilson replaced Teddy Roosevelt as president and appointed a new interior secretary, who ramrodded the Raker Act through Congress. Since then the Club has maintained a long-term dream of restoring the valley. Sierra Club founder John Muir called it "a grand landscape garden, one of Nature's rarest and most precious mountain temples". The thought of building such a huge dam and reservoir in a national park is unfathomable today.

A new study by the California Department of Water Resources has both proponents and opponents of Hetch Hetchy restoration spinning the story in their favor. Long-time opponents, led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, and the Chronicle have focused on the study's cost estimate of $3 - $10 billion and called the idea "dead".

Restoration backers, including the Sierra Club, along with Environmental Defense, Restore Hetch Hetchy, the Sacramento Bee, and some valiant state legislators, emphasize the state's findings that the project is "technically feasible", and are calling for hearings to determine how the costs figures were arrived at, what alternatives are feasible, and how the restoration plan might be financed. Thankfully, two visionary state assemblymembers, Lois Wolk and Joe Canciamilla, are hoping to convene those hearings in Sacramento to consider further analyses and alternatives.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the Hetch Hetchy controversy is that somehow San Francisco will need to find "a replacement for all that good clean water" that provides the city with its primary drinking-water source. In fact, the city need not lose a drop of water; it will simply gain more efficient and cost-effective ways of storing its water somewhere downstream of the national park.

The state engineers verified findings by Environmental Defense that with a few straightforward plumbing fixes, using groundwater storage or conservation, San Francisco could use Tuolumne River flows and other reservoirs to deliver more than 95% of the water and 60 - 80% of the power that its system currently provides.

But what of the report's $3 - 10 billion cost estimate? It turns out that these figures apply to a much bigger project, including expensive new dams that would allow storage of three to four times as much water as the Hetch Hetchy now provides. Of course such a huge expansion project is more expensive. The coming Assembly hearings have the potential not only to move along the path toward restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley, at lower costs than the state has projected, but also to show that new dams are not cost-effective.

And let's put these cost issues in perspective. This year's military budget is about $442 billion, and we think nothing of spending $10.4 billion on "missile defense", $2.6 billion for one Virginia class nuclear submarine, or $5.3 billion for five new F-35 "joint strike stealth" fighter planes. Couldn't we forgo a few of those orders in exchange for returning to its natural glory one of our planet's most impressive natural landscapes? Couldn't we devise a national/state/municipal partnership, financed in part by future park visitors?

The Sierra Club's national conservation director Bruce Hamilton recently called Hetch Hetchy restoration "a piece of unfinished work that John Muir left to his heirs". That's us, and we can do it!

The Sierra Club learned many lessons from the historic loss of Hetch Hetchy that broke John Muir's heart. As America's oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization, we have grown and diversified mightily over the last 100 years to meet ever-growing needs of our communities and our planet. We are working to stop global warming. We fight for environmental justice and to curb pollution and sprawl. Our members recycle, organize, take public transit, and buy hybrid cars. But let us not forget that we are inspired by nature, and we must also continue to fight for our wild heritage. For our families and our future, for generations to follow and for ourselves, let's make Hetch Hetchy a valley once again.

WhatYouCanDo

To get involved in the Hetch Hetchy restoration effort, contact or call (510)848-0800, ext. 304

Larry Fahn, immediate past president of the Sierra Club and executive director of As You Sow, a non-profit organization that works on corporate-accountability issues