San Luis Reservoir could be expanded to store more water
Motorists zooming along Highway 152 through Pacheco Pass between Gilroy and Los Banos notice an unusual site amid the parched, oak-studded hills: A vast inland sea.
The shimmering body of water, San Luis Reservoir, is 7 miles long and a key part of California's modern water supply created when President John F. Kennedy pushed a dynamite plunger there in 1962 to kick off its construction. Today water from the massive lake irrigates farmland across the Central Valley and also provides drinking water for Silicon Valley, including San Jose.
Friday, a major new construction project started at San Luis — a $1.1 billion plan by the federal government to strengthen the huge earthen dam and raise it 10 feet to reduce the risk of it collapsing in a major earthquake.
But more than earthquake safety work is afoot.
Water officials in increasingly drought-plagued California have been hoping another project can be attached to the seismic upgrade — an effort to build the 382-foot-high dam even higher to expand the size of the reservoir.
Raising the dam 20 feet instead of 10 would cost $1 billion more. But it also would create 130,000 acrefeet of new storage, enough water to supply the needs of at least 650,000 people for a year.
“Any investment in California water infrastructure is vitally important,” said Cannon Michael, a sixthgeneration farmer in Los Banos pushing to expand the reservoir. “The population has really increased in California, but we haven't kept up with our water investments.”
Michael is no ordinary farmer. The great-greatgreat-grandson of Henry Miller, a famous cattle baron in the late 1800s, he has a degree in English from UC Berkeley and serves as chairman of the board of the San Luis Delta Mendota Water Authority, an influential agency of 29 water districts that purchase water from the federal government, most of them in the Central Valley, but also including the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
In an interview, Michael said that 10 of the authority's water agencies have agreed in concept to help fund the $1 billion project to raise the dam.
“We have a group of investors. We're not far off,” he said. “Our goal is to get everybody signed and agreed to by the end of the year.”
California is famous for battles over dams — especially new dams on existing rivers.
Most of the best spots which yield the most water — such as Shasta Lake near Redding or Oroville reservoir in Butte County — were already taken generations ago. Other rivers, which run through Big Sur or the wild forests near the CaliforniaOregon border, are off-limits to dams, protected by the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.