The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy Volume 8 : San Francisco's Fight for a Yosemite Water Supply

The damming of Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park is widely seen as a watershed event in American environmental history.Passionately opposed by naturalist John Muir and his ardent supporters, the massive undertaking succeeded largely through the efforts of John R.Freeman, one of the most important, influential, and politically adroit engineers of the Progressive Era.In The Man Who Dammed Hetch Hetchy, Donald C. Jackson focuses on Freeman to offer a nuanced account of how the City of San Francisco won the right to transform the bucolic valley into a municipal water supply reservoir that, a century later, continues to serve millions of Bay Area residents. Central to Freeman's work for San Francisco from 1910 to 1913 was his design of a high-pressure aqueduct projected to deliver 400 million gallons of water per day to the Bay Area and generate more than 150,000 horsepower of electricity.Beyond crafting an extensively illustrated 42 -page report detailing his design, he also wo