Climate Fix: Hetch Hetchy Turns 100, Can It Meet the Challenges Brought by Climate Change?

The Hetch Hetchy reservoir was created a century ago to supply fresh water for millions of people in the Bay Area. It was created by damming the Tuolumne River, flooding a former mountain valley in the Sierras and forming a reservoir that can hold up to 117 billion gallons of water. Hetch Hetchy embodies a feat of modern engineering, but as the globe warms up and demand for water shifts, the reservoir’s storage capacity and water management capabilities may not hold up. For our next installment of Climate Fix: Rethinking Solutions for California, we’ll talk about how climate change is putting pressure on Hetch Hetchy and what a far warmer future means for this mountain bathtub.

Guests:

Samuel Sandoval Solis, PhD, professor, UC Davis; cooperative extension specialist in water resources management, Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources of the University of California

Newsha Ajami, PhD, chief development officer for research in Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and president, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission

Ezra David Romero, climate reporter, KQED

Peter Drekmeier, policy director, Tuolumne River Trust

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