The recent contamination problems with San Martin wells has made
me reflect recently on the Santa Clara County’s most important
resource: water.
The recent contamination problems with San Martin wells has made me reflect recently on the Santa Clara County’s most important resource: water.
It’s something most of us take for granted. We simply turn the faucet knob and it comes pouring out of the spigot clear and relatively clean (with a slight flavor of chlorine perhaps). But if this seemingly endless supply of H-2-O ever came to an end, the results would be catastrophic for us.
A great metropolis can never come into existence without the magical ingredient of water. London and Paris were created by their rivers. New York, New Orleans and San Francisco would not be world-famous cities without their bays. And, if it weren’t for the massive aqueduct projects, Los Angeles would certainly remain a dried-up desert village today.
The same can be said about Silicon Valley. Water as much as high-tech industry created it. In fact, the chip-making business could never have existed here without water. Highly purified tap water is used to cleanse chips during manufacturing.
In the early years of valley settlement, water obviously played an important role in the developing orchard business. Farmers dug artesian wells, which allowed the precious liquid to pour out of the ground due to the subsiding pressure of the land. By the 1890s, as these wells began to lose their pressure and dry up, farmers simply dug deeper wells and used pumping stations to bring up the water that was so vital to their crops.
In the 20th century, people began to notice a problem caused by this constant pumping of the groundwater supply. A geological phenomenon called subsidence was causing the land to sink severely. Imagine an air mattress, on top of which lies a heavy board. If the air is allowed to leak out, the board sinks lower and lower. Similarly, land sinks as water is drawn from the geological stratums.
By the 1960s, San Jose had sunk by 10 feet and Alviso, by San Francisco Bay, had dropped 13 feet. With this descending land, bay water began to creep up, drowning small villages such as Drawbridge, which is now a ghost town along the Amtrak tracks near Alviso.
With the drought years of the 1920s and 1930s, the Valley’s population realized the necessity of conserving water. In 1929, a water conservation district was formed, which built six dams in San Clara County in the next six years. These dams caught the rain runoff from winter storms, helping to ease the problems of flooding that had plagued the valley since the days of the Spanish missionaries. The South Valley’s Anderson Reservoir was created during this period.
Compounding the need for water was the Valley’s population surge following World War II. Rain would simply not provide enough water for the growing population and industry. Viewing the success of the Los Angeles aqueduct system, the county and state (funding in part by federal dollars) began building the South Bay Aqueduct, a $50 million pipeline which moved water from the Sacramento-San Jouquin River Delta.
On July 1, 1965, Governor Edmund G. Brown dedicated the opening of this project by pouring mercury from a vial into a small tank. This closed an electric circuit, which caused a pump to pull water into the pipeline.
In the north, cities such as Palo Alto and Menlo Park also began to receive water from San Francisco’s Hetch Hetchy aqueduct, which transported water from the Sierras. A third aqueduct for the Valley was the more than $500 million San Felipe Project. This 35-mile system of pipes conveyed water to us from San Luis Reservoir along Pacheco Pass in Merced County east of Gilroy. It opened in 1987, just in time for the valley’s big population boom of the 1990s.
Today, most of the valley’s residents take their showers, water their yards, wash their cars, and turn on the tap with little thought of the engineering marvels that make their lives here possible. And the impact of water also is seen at the grocery store. In California, 78 percent of the water used goes to agriculture – growing the crops that feed our civilization – and about 22 percent is for urban requirements.
It’s pretty amazing the impact of this simple molecule of two hydrogen atoms combined with an oxygen atom. About four trillion gallons of the stuff falls on the planet daily in the form of precipitation. And Earth’s surface is covered with 70 percent water. So it’s obvious quantity is not necessarily the problem for human survival. It’s distribution.
Benjamin Franklin once commented, “When the well’s dry, we know the worth of water.” How pertinent his observation has become for us this year with the revelation of the contamination of wells in the South Valley.
Martin Cheek is a reporter for the Gilroy Dispatch. He is the author of ‘The Silicon Valley Handbook.’ His column appears every second and fifth Friday of the month.
