The Battle over Hetch Hetchy: America's Most Controversial Dam and the Birth of Modern Environmentalism by Robert W. Righter

Author:Robert W. Righter
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: History
Published: 2012-06-21T23:14:42+00:00

FIGURE 13. Financing the Hetch Hetchy project proved a difficult task. Here Mayor James Rolph (seated front row, center) and City Engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy (to Rolph's right) pose with a number of supervisors and Bank of Italy executives. The commitment of A. P. Gianniui and the Bank of Italy, which evolved into the Bank of America, assured that the project would move forward. Courtesy of the SFPUC.

The building of the Hetch Hetchy system was a combination of public and private efforts. The first major city effort was to build a darn at Lake Eleanor. Out of the Hetch Hetchy Valley to the northwest snaked a rough gravel-and-rock wagon road to Lake Eleanor. Following an old trail, in 1916 a city crew had used generous amounts of dynamite to blast a road up the steep canyon and then cut the road to the lake, some 12 miles away. The city always assumed that Lake Eleanor and Cherry Creek would be tapped as part of the water system, but there was a reason for immediately developing Lake Eleanor. Both at Hetch Hetchy and at the city headquarters in Groveland, contractors had to have electricity, and a darn at Eleanor Lake and a turbine placed downstream on the combined Eleanor and Cherry creeks would provide it. By August 1917 "trains" of trucks, six in a row, wound their way up the treacherous, switchback road. They made three trips every 24 hours, hauling the cement necessary to construct the attractive, multiplearch 1,260-foot-long dam. By late spring of 1918 workers had finished the dam, catching the spring runoff for power production. Kerosene lamps could be cast aside as electricity flowed up and down the river, from Groveland to the Hetch Hetchy site. 111 Electric power, necessary to move the project forward, was now assured. Soon the city engineers would begin plans for the much larger powerhouse at Moccasin Creek.

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