Hetch Hetchy in the News - Restore Hetch Hetchy

News: Study says Hetch Hetchy Valley can be restored; critics pounce
By Herbert A. Sample
Sacramento Bee, (September 28, 2004
Hoping to jump-start the necessary social, political and legal forces, a veteran environmental group on Monday unveiled a months-long study supporting the feasibility of restoring Yosemite National Park's Hetch Hetchy Valley by demolishing an 80-year-old dam.

Editorial: Hetch Hetchy Reclaimed: Hetch Hetchy's future
It is Time for New chapter, New Champions
Sacramento Bee, (September 20, 2004)
Ninety years ago, Hetch Hetchy's fate in Yosemite National
Park was decided, but it was not sealed.... It is possible now to imagine a different future for Hetch Hetchy.

Editorial: Hetch Hetchy Reclaimed: Drain it, then what?
Restoration is a function of time, politics
Sacramento Bee, (September 19, 2004)
Hetch Hetchy, the smaller twin of Yosemite Valley, might look dead on those occasions, but it's not, according to federal biologists who studied the matter. Its state is rather like that of a deep sleep.... The fate of a spectacular valley in a national park is worth another look. Restoration would certainly take years, even decades. But as a natural marvel, united once again with the Yosemite Valley to the south, Hetch Hetchy would be something to behold.

Editorial: A river's 'rajahs': Modesto, Turlock hold key to Hetch Hetchy
Sacramento Bee, (September 13, 2004)
The lesson of the Raker Act still rings true today, 90 years later, as this river returns to the public focus.... Obviously, San Francisco's role in restructuring a river deal is crucial if Hetch Hetchy is to be reclaimed. But today, as in 1913, nothing can be accomplished without the boards of the Modesto and Turlock irrigation districts.

Editorial: Addiction explained: What Yosemite purifies, S.F. drinks
Sacramento Bee, (September 12, 2004)
How proud is San Francisco of its water? You can buy it in a bottle as if it were Perrier, that's how proud. "Hetch Hetchy," reads the bottle's label. "Contains mountain water from a municipal source high within the Sierra Nevada." What's missing is the fine print about how the "municipal source" is a once-magnificent valley in Yosemite National Park. That valley now lies submerged under 300 feet of water, water that supplies San Francisco and much of the Bay Area.

Editorial: Yosemite on the cheap: San Francisco got a valley for a bargain
Sacramento Bee, ( September 7, 2004)
What can you get for less than $85 in Yosemite National Park? If you're a member of the public, $84.70 will buy you and your family a night in one of the park's tent cabins in Yosemite Valley. If that sounds like a bargain, wait until you hear about the deal San Francisco gets. To enjoy free rein in Hetch Hetchy, the neighboring glacial valley that features Yosemite-like waterfalls and granite peaks, the city of San Francisco pays the federal government even less - $82.19 a day, to be exact.

Editorial: Muir's plea: A voice for the ages and for Hetch Hetchy
Sacramento Bee, ( September 5, 2004)
Naturalist, author and activist John Muir introduced Yosemite to the outside world more than a century ago through his exquisite writings. He championed the creation of the national park. And when San Francisco proposed to dam one of Yosemite's two deep glacial valleys - the Hetch Hetchy Valley on the Tuolumne River - Muir led the opposition... Muir's role, as the witness and environmental conscience for the debate over the valley, is unchanged. His lasting power comes from his extensive collection of articles and letters about Yosemite, about San Francisco, about politics. They are remarkably timeless. So timeless, that with a little journalistic license, questions facing Hetch Hetchy today can be answered using quotations from Muir's writings nearly a century ago.

Forum - Hetch Hetchy reclaimed: In 1987, an attempt to bring back the valley
By Tom Philp -- Bee Associate Editor
Sacramento Bee, (August 30, 2004)
Was he ahead of his time or out of his mind to propose what
he did? In 1987, the Interior Secretary for President Reagan, Donald Hodel, sought to focus public attention on the smaller twin of Yosemite Valley, known as Hetch Hetchy. He suggested getting rid of the dam in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, restoring this landscape inside the national park and somehow replacing the water supply for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Editorial - San Francisco's paradox: A green agenda everywhere - except Yosemite
Sacramento Bee, (August 30, 2004)
When it comes to San Francisco's environmental sensibilities,
no cause is too distant, no endeavor too bold.... Hetch Hetchy is San Francisco's great civic contradiction. While the city's environmental agenda spans the globe, it keeps a glacial valley locked away close to home. San Francisco claims part of a national park, a public treasure, for its own utilitarian purposes of securing water and electricity.

Forum: Hetch Hetchy reclaimed: CALVIN says the dam can go
Hetch Hetchy is expendable, new tool finds
By Tom Philp -- Bee Associate Editor
Sacramento Bee, (August 29, 2004)
University of California, Davis, graduate student named Sarah Null took a new computer model that analyzes water management and asked the computer a century-old question: Does San Francisco really need to rely on a dam in Yosemite National Park?

Editorial: Hetch Hetchy reclaimed - The dam downstream
Computer: You don't need Hetch Hetchy
Sacramento Bee, (August 29, 2004).
Last year, the minds behind CALVIN tried an interesting exercise. They programmed CALVIN to consider Hodel's idea. CALVIN punched a virtual hole in a virtual Hetch Hetchy dam. It added a virtual pipe and a virtual pump downstream. CALVIN then calculated whether San Francisco would be short of water. The results surprised its human operators. CALVIN found minimal impact. Hetch Hetchy's dam, CALVIN announced, is expendable.

Graphic: Hetch Hetchy Delivery System
Sacramento Bee, (August 29, 2004).

Forum: Looking again at Hetch Hetchy
Nine decades after senators debated flooding Yosemite's twin jewel, the arguments still resonate
Sacramento Bee, (August 22, 2004).
More than 90 years ago, just before the stroke of midnight on Dec. 6, 1913, the U.S. Senate voted to flood one of the jewels of the national park system.... Over the years, some have suggested the decision be revisited, but they never got anywhere. Any change at Hetch Hetchy would mean changing the Raker Act, and a new national debate would arise. That debate is worth having, as a series of editorials beginning today explains. Nearly 91 years after the debate, there is mounting evidence that it is possible to see another way to accomplish the Raker Act's aims while restoring Hetch Hetchy to the national park system and the American people.

Editorial: The lost Yosemite: It's time to imagine Hetch Hetchy restored
Sacramento Bee (August 22, 2004).
"... an idea once considered fanciful, even quixotic, gains legitimacy: Drain Hetch Hetchy - an enlarged hole at the dam's base would do the job - and let nature begin to reclaim this spectacular setting.
That may sound simple, but it isn't. It would require some changes to the Bay Area's water system and a consensus among major holders of Tuolumne River water rights. But if the notion is complicated, it is not out of the realm of the possible and is well worth discussing. An upcoming replumbing of San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy system and a convincing restoration proposal generated by a new computer program at the University of California, Davis, make this an appropriate time for the conversation to begin.

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