A recent report about the continuing effort to restore Hetch-Hetchy contains an interesting statistic. It claims there are 2.5 million dams in the US. I scratch my head. Somewhere around 300 million people in the US. So we've built roughly one dam for every hundred or so people. Dam! That's a lot of dams.

Personally I don't care if they tear down O'Shaughnessy Dam. Just as long as they don't force me to drink Sacramento River water. The San Francisco Water Board was on to something a hundred years ago. Rather than drink Sacramento River silt, they ran a pipeline a hundred miles or so to get fresh mountain spring water. When Los Angeles played hardball in the water wars, we pretty much gave 'em the Sacramento. Sure we complained bitterly about stealing our water and destroying the ecology of our mud. But if it's a choice of giving up our pristine water or our silt, take the silt. Please. Somewhere around Tracy the California aqueduct (carrying Sacramento water south to L.A.) crosses directly beneath the Hetch-Hetchy pipeline, carrying pretty good water to San Francisco.