in this issue

ABOUT 13 YEARS ago, when I went back to Washington, DC, for a couple of weeks to research the history of Hetch Hetchy and the Raker Act in the national archives, I met an archivist who specialized in Department of the Interior records. "Ah, Hetch Hetchy," he said with a sigh when I described my project. "That's a hell of a story." The archive guy and I got to be pals over the next few days; he'd found a kindred soul, someone who actually wanted to spend eight hours a day reading old memos from Harold Ickes. Every once in a while I'd get up from the library desk where I was working and ask his permission to remove some staples to copy pages, and I'd show him some juicy telegram or note, and we'd both say "Wow" and have a bit of slightly obsessed-researcher bonding.

Since then I didn't think there was anyone else in the country (other then Joe Neilands, the retired Berkeley biochemist who first brought the story to the Bay Guardian in 1969) who was as fascinated by this history as I am. But whadya know: We are not alone.

John Warfield Simpson, a professor of landscape architecture and natural resources at Ohio State University, spent even more time than I did with the old history books. His new book, Dam!: Water, Power, Politics and Preservation in Hetch Hetchy and Yosemite National Park, goes into awesome detail about how San Francisco has systematically violated federal law for more than 80 years. Simpson is as boggled as I am by the fact that the US Supreme Court held more than half a century ago that San Francisco must set up a public power system or lose the dam. Ickes, a tenacious and powerful interior secretary, did everything he could possibly do to enforce the law. "His inability to do so," Simpson writes, "defies reason."

Although Simpson also quotes the late Sen. George Norris of Nebraska, a public power supporter who wrote in his autobiography, "I underestimated the resourcefulness of the Pacific Gas and Electric Company."

All of a sudden, there's a lot of interest in this story. Another professor, Robert W. Righter of Southern Methodist University, has written a book called The Battle over Hetchy Hetchy. There's a new movie by documentary filmmaker Carol Lancaster Mingus called San Francisco's Broken Promise (see page 86). And somehow, there's not much in the local press about any of it.

Tim Redmond tredmond@sfbg.com