Letter: Wrecking the Tuolumne

When urban water districts using Hetch Hetchy water, the Coastside County Water District being one of them, push for more water via the system to serve growth and development, considerations of responsibility and sustainability are seldom heard.

Freshwater sources for the entire state of California are already oversubscribed—unsustainably overdrawn. All but a couple of the state’s rivers are disrupted by dams. Now, whenever a water district seeks more water from somewhere else in the state, they act blatantly to harm that other place to serve themselves. Interwoven combines of urban political power and wealth rule, and they prefer to bully more water out of other places rather than conserve to make do with the water they already have. (And, of course, there is no increased wealth to be had in reaching a sustainable population size and level of resource usage and then maintaining it.)

The City of San Francisco, owner-operator of the Hetch Hetchy System, is currently proposing expanded withdrawals from the already degraded Tuolumne River, the source of its water. Destruction of a valley inside a national park and the slaughter of one of the central state’s best salmon runs are only part of the story. Over 60 percent of the Tuolumne’s water is already being used to serve development and agriculture. San Francisco’s needs being somewhat static, the additional water would be distributed almost entirely to meet growing demands by the several dozen water districts outside the city that are customers. CCWD is one of these. Killing an ecosystem to water more lawns.

People in Half Moon Bay and El Granada with a modicum of responsibility and common sense might wish to go to www.tuolumne.org to learn more about the current and projected consequences of what they are participating in. Learn what people elsewhere have been doing to restore what is left of the Tuolumne. Learn why the government of a small, rural county opposes the withdrawals and what the negative effects on that county’s economy would be. In other words, learn a bit about the gluttony of growth in an overpopulated region and the harm it does. Then consider your role in it all and what you might do about it.

Carl May

NOTE: This was originally published in Coastsider’s Town Hall. Please post your replies to the Town Hall topic. Email [email protected] for access to posting in Town Hall if you don’t already have it.