Word: dam
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...clear water it impounds flows to some 2.4 million people and 75,000 businesses in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the power generated by that water's downhill rush supplies electricity to such vital operations as San Francisco's schools, municipal-transit system and international airport. If the dam were removed, that water and power would have to be replaced somehow, which is why the Public Utility Commission's Leal considers the idea "just plain goofy...
...Defense, the Restore Hetch Hetchy campaign is stirring up more interest than anyone expected. This week the California Resources Agency is host to a daylong workshop on the Hetch Hetchy question that promises to look broadly at what is known about the costs--and the benefits--of pulling the dam down...
...Shaughnessy Dam was stirring controversy even before 1913, when the U.S. Congress, against the impassioned pleas of conservationist John Muir and his Sierra Club, voted through a bill allowing its construction. But though the debate is not new, the context has changed dramatically. On one hand, free-running rivers, unobstructed by dams, have become a rarity, which has increased their aesthetic, ecological and recreational value. On the other hand, with recent experience of protracted drought and soaring energy costs, Western states in particular are more worried than ever about the security of both their water supplies and sources of hydropower...
...concerns should take precedence? That question has been coming up with increasing regularity in both Western and Eastern states. Just last month, for example, the Arizona Public Service Company shut down two aging hydropower plants that no longer produced much electricity and opened the gates of a small diversion dam that for nearly a century had shunted water away from Arizona's Fossil Creek, a spring-fed tributary of the Verde River. As a thin ribbon of water trickled through, Dr. Robin Silver of the Center for Biological Diversity cheered. "In four to five years, the whole face of this...
That many good things can happen when dams are removed is well documented. In 1999, for example, when a deconstruction crew took a wrecking ball to the Edwards Dam on Maine's Kennebec River, the results stunned even those who had lobbied for the dam's removal. Important fish species that used to swim from the ocean to spawn upstream--Atlantic salmon, alewives, sturgeon and shad--didn't just come back, marvels Pete Didisheim, advocacy director of the Natural Resources Council of Maine, "they surged back." The next year, almost a million alewives were massing in the river. Fish...