The new 2005 edition of San Francisco Water and Power, A History of the Municipal Water Department and Hetch Hetchy System, released today, celebrates the extraordinary events and memorable leaders who conceived, designed and built San Francisco’s water system with foresight to provide today’s Bay Area with high quality drinking water supplies. The city’s need for reliable water supplies after the devastation of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906 brought the brightest engineers of their day to meet the challenges of hydraulic engineering across more than 160 miles of wilderness, developing new technologies and construction techniques, mastering impassable terrain and intractable financial woes to complete the incredible water works that fosters the high quality of life and economic strength that our 21st century San Francisco Bay Area enjoys.

San Francisco Water and Power traces water flow from household taps back to the sources – through the city’s distribution system, Bay Area pipelines and tunnels to the storage reservoirs in the Peninsula and East Bay, across the San Joaquin Valley and through the foothill pipelines, tunnels and hydroelectric power plants in the Mother Lode, up through the mountain tunnels to the dams and impounding reservoirs in the high Sierra Nevada to Mount Lyell in Yosemite National Park – the ultimate source of San Francisco’s water and power resources.

The 2005 edition features a full-color system map and timeline of major events in the development of San Francisco’s water and power system, along with previously unpublished photographs. Copies of San Francisco Water and Power, A History of the Municipal Water Department and Hetch Hetchy System are no longer available.  Please download the attached pages below to access this publication.