O'Shaughnessy Dam
The O'Shaughnessy Dam is in Hetch Hetchy Valley, in the Grand Canyon of the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park, California, in the United States of America.The dam was finished in 1923, primarily to provide water for the city of San Francisco, as well as hydropower. Notably, San Francisco had suffered horribly during fires for lack of water, notably in her 1906 earthquake, and was fishing for a dependable water source. Hetch Hetchy Valley fit the bill.
The dam was subject to controversy from the start, with pioneering environmentalist John Muir vehemently opposing the plan to his death in 1914, famously observing,
- Dam 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.
In 1987, the idea of razing the O'Shaughnessy gained an adherent from an unexpected quarter — Donald Hodel, then secretary of the Department of the Interior under President Ronald Reagan, was trying to polish the Reagan administration's poor environmental image, and once advocated tearing down the dam.
Nothing ever came of it; there were suspicions that he had other political pretexts, to see residents of the left wing city of San Francisco coming out against an environmental issue — the leftist mayor of San Francisco, Sen. Dianne Feinstein said in a Los Angeles Times story in 1987: "All this is for an expanded campground? ... It's dumb, dumb, dumb."
The reservoir behind the O'Shaughnessy, owned by San Francisco, serves around 2.4 million people in the city, the Peninsula, as well as Silicon Valley and in southern Alameda County.
