Dam Dispute Looses a Flood of Emotions

Ron Good surveys the high-walled splendor of this prehistoric corner of Yosemite National Park and solemnly promises to renew the long-dormant environmental battle that broke the spirit of famed naturalist John Muir.

“Look what humans have done here,” he scowls. “Trust me; this will not stand.”

Good and a cadre of conservationists have launched a campaign to remove the dam that flooded the valley Muir considered sacred, its waterfalls and towering rock faces rivaling the majesty of Yosemite Valley itself.

Completed in 1923 to supply water and power for a growing San Francisco, the dam altered the course of the Tuolumne River and inundated much of the natural beauty celebrated by Muir.

The activists are threatening to oppose a $4-billion seismic retrofit of the city’s water delivery system unless officials agree to explore alternatives to Hetch Hetchy that could lead to tearing down O’Shaughnessy Dam. They say there are existing reservoirs downstream on the Tuolumne--behind the Don Pedro and Calaveras dams--that would provide adequate water storage.

If its request is denied, Good’s coalition of environmentalists intends to oppose a $1.6-billion bond measure that officials want to put on the November ballot. The money would help pay for repairs to the 160-mile-long complex of aqueducts, running from Yosemite to the Bay Area, that supplies water to 2.4 million homes in 31 communities.

The improvement project would be among the largest in city history but would matter little to Good and his allies if it didn’t help bring back Hetch Hetchy.

“This is a place where nature should prevail,” said Good, executive director of Restore Hetch Hetchy and a former Sierra Club lobbyist, shouting over the roar of water at the 312-foot dam. “Instead, a once-wild river has been choked off. You might as well flood the floor of the Sistine Chapel, because that’s what they’ve done.”

While mainstream environmentalists like the Sierra Club have yet to endorse Good’s effort to undam Hetch Hetchy, some San Francisco supervisors have termed the proposal “intriguing.” Said Supervisor Aaron Peskin: “People say this dam is the sin of our ancestors. For me, taking it down is definitely worth exploring.”

But Mayor Willie Brown isn’t buying the idea. “These people are not even a blip on the radar screen,” said Brown spokesman P.J. Johnston. “They have absolutely no cachet here. In a city with the most knee-jerk, liberal, environmentally enthusiastic people in the world, there is no talk whatsoever of funding a study for some pet project to tear down that dam.”

Hetch Hetchy activists say such comments demonstrate San Francisco’s hypocrisy when it comes to environmental causes. Locals are fond of displaying “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers to protest how Los Angeles has siphoned water from the Mono Basin and Owens Valley.

And although Bay Area environmentalists condemn the manipulation of natural resources to move water from north to south, their ideological forefathers erected the only major dam inside a national park, activists say.

“The Bay Area prides itself on its environmental ethic while drawing its water from a national park, out of something the country now regards as a major mistake,” said Roderick Nash, professor emeritus of history at UC Santa Barbara.

Besides altering the geography of a national park, the activists charge, San Francisco officials have treated Hetch Hetchy as their own private preserve, maintaining a pricey chalet at the reservoir for their exclusive use while restricting tourist visiting hours. As a result, Good says only 2% of Yosemite’s 3 million annual visitors see Hetch Hetchy.

Standing recently on the shore of the reservoir, Good read for mystified tourists his “Hetchysburg Address.” It begins “Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth upon this continent a new dam and reservoir, conceived in the Bay Area, and dedicated to the proposition that all national parks are not created equal.”

In 1987, Donald P. Hodel, secretary of the Interior under President Reagan, challenged city officials to tear down the dam and restore Hetch Hetchy Valley. Calling the request political gamesmanship, Democrat Dianne Feinstein--the city’s mayor at the time--referred to Hetch Hetchy as “a San Francisco birthright,” adding that to destroy the dam would be “dumb, dumb, dumb.”

The original battle over Hetch Hetchy--an Indian term for “Grass Valley”-- became the first national controversy over Western water rights. After the 1906 earthquake, when water was in short supply to douse the resulting fires, San Francisco renewed its decades-old efforts to tap Yosemite for water.

Muir lobbied Congress and three presidents--including Theodore Roosevelt--to prevent the city from building the dam. Referring to San Francisco officials as “Satan and Co.,” and the “grabbers of water and power,” he enlisted the voices of newspapers nationwide.

A New York Times editorial referred to the big city “steam roller” in questioning the wisdom of sacrificing “a large part of the Yosemite National Park to the tender mercies of the San Francisco Philistines who know how to ‘improve’ the handiwork of the Creator.”

In response, officials dismissed environmentalists opposing the dam as “short-haired women and long-haired men.”

Congress soon approved the damming of the Tuolumne River in Hetch Hetchy’s narrow lower end, entombing the valley’s meandering meadows and streams under 300 feet of water. The year before his death in 1914, the decision prompted Muir to exclaim: “Dam the Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”

Feinstein, now a U.S. senator, still scoffs at dismantling the dam. “Tearing down the dam at this time is one of the worst things that could happen,” she said in a statement. “It could jeopardize the drinking water for 3 million people. The effort to take down this crown jewel is not something new. We fought back in the past, and similar efforts were not successful.”

The activist coalition--which includes Environmental Defense and the Planning and Conservation League--wants San Francisco to spend $600,000 to fund a feasibility study on relocating the city’s reservoir outside Yosemite.

The activists have asked for an answer before Aug. 27, the deadline for submitting arguments for the city’s November ballot.

The Sierra Club has yet to join the coalition, and its conservation director, Bruce Hamilton, admits the effort is a longshot. “But in the long haul,” he said, “it’s more valuable for society to have back a second Yosemite Valley than a water storage tank inside a national park.”

Yet historians say the water stakes are too high for San Francisco to surrender its dam easily.

“Hetch Hetchy is at the core of San Francisco’s urban identity,” said historian and State Librarian Kevin Starr. “This dam is a sacrifice made to create a great city. Whether you can come back and rewrite the story is an enterprise of heroic magnitude. I just don’t see the will to tear it down, which is the equivalent of dismantling the city’s civic identity.”

Supervisor Tom Ammiano agrees that San Francisco has a chip on its shoulder when it comes to Hetch Hetchy: “There’s pride involved here. People feel very proprietary about this dam.”

Hodel says his challenge to San Francisco to do right by Hetch Hetchy still stands.

“The thought of watching that valley come back to life is exciting,” he said. “But I’d leave one piece of that dam intact as a reminder of what we did to this valley. If you totally erase it, no one would believe that anyone would ever have had the audacity to flood something so beautiful.”

Even with its dam, national park officials say, Yosemite is still a place that would make Muir proud.

Said Yosemite Supt. Dave Mihalic: “I’d like to think that if John Muir came back today and saw the changes to the Bay Area, if he had to take those freeways and endure all that traffic, by the time he arrived here in Yosemite, he’d actually be pretty pleased the way it looks now, despite the dam.”

But that’s not enough for Good. The activist, who insists that he can see the image of Muir in one of Hetch Hetchy’s rock faces, says the bearded conservationist’s soul still haunts the place.

“We think we’re so smart, managing every drop of water, every snowflake,” he said. “There’s no other opportunity like this on Earth to restore such beauty. Man built this dam. Man can take it down.”