#10: Water made orchards, silicon chip industry sprout faster
SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS, December
22, 1999.
BY FRANK SWEENEY
Mercury News Staff Writer
On a gray day, several hundred people
gathered in
the East San Jose foothills to
mark, many thought, the end
of Santa Clara County's water crisis.
The sun burst through the
clouds to cast a shimmer onto Penitencia
Creek's
percolation ponds just as the governor
rose to speak.
``We are here to mark our progress
in constructing the
boldest water project in the history
of this or
any other nation,'' Gov.
Edmund G. ``Pat'' Brown said. ``We are
here to dedicate the first major
part of the State
Water Project to be completed.''
It was July 1, 1965. Brown
poured a vial of
mercury into a miniature tank to
complete an electrical circuit,
which triggered the release of
a cascade of water into a 2.5
million-gallon tank.
For the first time, water from the
Sacramento-San
Joaquin River Delta flowed into
Santa Clara County,
traveling 44 miles through the
$50 million South Bay Aqueduct.
``It was our first water import
project, and it
was essential to the growth we
were anticipating,'' said Sig
Sanchez, then chairman of
the Santa Clara County Board of
Supervisors and now a Santa Clara
Valley Water
District director.
``The valley would have grown, but
not at the rate
it has, because we would not have
been able to accommodate the
Silicon Valley,'' he said.
Water is critical to the semiconductor
industry, which
purifies tap water. This super-clean
water is then
used in each step of the manufacturing
process to cleanse the
silicon wafers that will become
computer chips.
As far as ending the water crisis,
the South Bay
Aqueduct was just a beginning.
Twenty-two years later, a second
project brought
water into the county from the
San Joaquin Valley through Pacheco
Pass in the San Felipe system of
tunnels and pipelines.
Half of water is brought in
Those two water projects, along
with San
Francisco's Hetch Hetchy system
that runs through the northern part
of the county, today supply on
average half the water Santa Clara
County uses. The water comes from
the Sacramento-San Joaquin
River Delta and the Sierra Nevada.
They helped the county survive an
extended
drought. They halted sinking of
the land caused by
pumping too much water from underground
basins.
Without those two projects there
would not be
enough water for the 1.64 million
residents of
Santa Clara County, for the high-tech
industries
of Silicon Valley, for the lawns
of sprawling
San Jose suburbia, or for the little
agriculture
that survives in the South County.
That's because Santa Clara County's
unique system
of dams and percolation ponds and
canals --
started in the '30s to capture
winter storm runoff
for recharge into the valley's
underground water
basins -- could no longer meet
our needs.
``I think it showed an awful
lot of forethought on
the part of the county, realizing
the need for
water and what they had to do to
get it,'' said
James Lenihan, who was elected
to the water
conservation district board in
1960 and served on
the successor Santa Clara Valley
Water District
board through 1996.
Santa Clara Valley by nature is
a semiarid place,
with average annual rainfall about
the same as
that of Los Angeles (San Jose 14.42
inches; Los
Angeles 14.77 inches). The history
of the valley
is a continual quest for
water.
In the 1890s, as thirsty irrigated
orchards
replaced dry-land grain farming,
the overtaxed wells
lost their artesian pressure. Wells
had to be
drilled deeper and deeper to reach
the dropping water
table, which now had to be pumped.
This triggered subsidence, or sinking,
of the
land's surface, where the weight
of the land
compacts the underground sand and
gravel aquifers
that have been drained.
On top of that, a severe drought
gripped the Santa
Clara Valley in the late 1920s
and early 1930s.
All of that spurred voters in 1929
to form a water
conservation district. By 1936,
six dams were built.
Their purpose: capture runoff water
from winter
storms in reservoirs instead of
letting it flow into
San Francisco Bay. In dry months,
the water is
releasedslowly into natural
stream beds and
off-stream percolation ponds to
soak through sand
and gravel deposits to replenish
the aquifers below.
Two more reservoirs were completed
by 1952, the same year the
valley started to get some water
from San
Francisco's Hetch Hetchy pipeline.
But water
planners recognized that would
not be enough.
In the mid-1950s, the water conservation
district
and the newly formed county flood-control
district
began considering importing water.
The
conservation district favored the
federal San Felipe
Project. The flood district favored
bringing in water
from the State Water Project's
South Bay Aqueduct.
The two agencies finally agreed
that the state water
would be available first. In 1965,
water flowed
from the south delta through Livermore
in the South
Bay Aqueduct into San Jose's Berryessa
area. The
water first was used for groundwater
recharge and
today goes to the district's Penitencia
treatment
plant.
Water makes sinking stop
By 1969, imported water had halted
large-scale
subsidence, which over the years
had dropped
the elevations of downtown San
Jose by 10 feet and
bayside Alviso by 13 feet.
The federal San Felipe Project faced
several
delays. Federal funds were diverted
to finance the
Vietnam War. Environmental lawsuits
charged the
project would be growth-inducing.
Construction finally started in
1979 on the
project's keystone -- a 5.2-mile
tunnel beneath
Pacheco Pass. Over the next eight
years, a second,
1.1-mile tunnel was bored, a powerful
pumping station was built and a
pipeline network
was constructed. The cost -- more
than a
half-billion dollars.
Water began flowing through the
35-mile system
from San Luis Reservoir in Merced
County in
summer of 1987 and it arrived just
in time.
A six-year drought had begun the
winter before.
And while the state and federal
projects
supplied some water to the county
in that period,
the drought drove home the point
that a
water-importation system is no
panacea.
With the lessons of drought and
the tremendous
growth of Silicon Valley, water
planners know
more is needed. But the days of
massive public
works projects are at an end.
``With the environmental movement,
we would never
have been able to do now what we
did
then,'' Lenihan said. ``We were
able to get it in
place before the movement came
along to say no
more reservoirs, no pipelines,
no aqueducts.''
Meeting future needs hinges much
more on
conservation and water reclamation.
And ultimately, the limit on Santa
Clara County's
growth may not be traffic congestion,
air
pollution or the outrageous cost
of housing. It
may be the finite amount of water
we can get.
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