Bay Area Drinking Water To Flow Beneath The Bay
MENLO PARK (KCBS) -- The aging pipes mounted atop wooden trestles a century ago to send water from the Hetch Hetchy River to the Bay Area will be replaced by a unique tunnel beneath the San Francisco Bay.
"That's the seismically safest place to put it" since no fault lines run across the Bay, said Ed Harrington, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission which oversees the Hetch Hetchy system.
KCBS Chris Filippi Reporting:
A tunnel boring machine on Friday started digging out a tunnel 15 feet in diameter that will eventually house a five-mile delivery pipe running from Newark to Menlo Park.
The pipe, part of a $4.6 billion seismic upgrade of the system, will run 40 to 100 feet beneath the ground. BART's Transbay Tube actually rests on the floor of the Bay, the five-mile tunnel the first one that truly runs underneath the San Francisco Bay.
Hetch Hetchy provides water to about 2.5 million households in San Francisco, on the Peninsula and in the South Bay. Communities outside San Francisco have committed to paying two-thirds of the tunnel's cost, officials said.
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