San Francisco Proposition F seeks plan to drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir
John Wildermuth for the San Francisco Chronicle:
Proposition F would require [San Francisco] to put together a plan to destroy the city-owned O’Shaughnessy Dam and drain Hetch Hetchy Reservoir so that the valley, part of Yosemite National Park, can be restored to its original wild state.
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The reservoir now is the keystone of a 160-mile-long system that serves 2.5 million people in San Francisco, the Peninsula and parts of Silicon Valley and the East Bay. While the system is made up of nine dams, Hetch Hetchy holds 85 percent of the available water.
This story has a little bit of everything: environmentalism vs. pragmatism, the right of a city to determine matters of other cities and a federal park, and politics, naturally.