‘Really a Work of Art’ : Vandal Paints Crack on Park Dam

An environmental artist with the skills of a mountain climber painted a giant crack down the face of Hetch Hetchy Reservoir dam, park officials said Monday. “It was really a work of art--it wasn’t just graffiti,” said Dean Coffey, general manager with the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power District, which provides water to San Francisco and surrounding communities. “Whoever did it has a lot of pride.”

The vandal painted the 40-foot crack on the 312-foot-high O’Shaughnessy Dam, in Yosemite National Park, in the darkness Thursday night. Dam officials quickly painted over the crack, which included the five-foot-high words “Free the Rivers--J. Muir,” as soon as they discovered it Friday morning, Coffey said.

John Muir was a leading environmentalist and explorer who fought to keep state legislators from approving the dam. Muir lost the battle in 1913 with the passage of the Raker Act, which allowed San Francisco to build the dam and supply the city with water.

The painter of the crack would have had to work off ropes hung from the top of the dam, Coffey said.

“You have to be a pretty fair construction hand to do that sort of thing. They had to have some rigging and been skilled,” he said.

Park officials have begun an investigation, Coffey said. The caper was probably executed by “Earth First or one of those organizations that do that kind of work,” he said.

A similar incident in 1980 was not discovered for two days and no one was charged in the incident, he said.

O’Shaughnessy Dam, completed in 1923, holds back 340,000 acre feet of water on the Tuolumne River to form Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. An acre foot is 325,000 gallons, or the amount of water an average suburban family uses in one year, a water department official said.