The electricity that admiral San Francisco's streetlights, schools, and all-embracing airport begins as a torrent of baptize inside—of all places—the declared accustomed altar that is Yosemite Civic Park. A aeon ago, a aboriginal basin was sacrificed so that San Francisco could abide to exist.
The Hetch Hetchy Ability Arrangement is still amenable for San Francisco's borough power, befitting the lights on in accessible barrio and the apparatus axis for the MUNI busline system. This all-inclusive section of basement comprises a dam, three powerhouses, the aggregation boondocks of Moccasin (which is absolutely endemic by San Francisco), several substations, and hundreds of afar of ability curve abutting the city-limits to its lifeblood. A alongside arrangement of baptize pipes carries baptize from Yosemite into San Francisco.
Last summer, San Francisco-based artisan Jenny Odell set out to see this arrangement ambuscade in apparent sight. Her activity Power Trip abstracts a about-face journey, afterward the aisle of electricity astern from the city-limits to Yosemite. She agilely traced the ability curve application Google Maps's digital view, mapping out the aisle that she after took by car.
(We've featured her plan on satellite angel cutouts on Gizmodo, too.)
The avenue took her accomplished suburbs, vineyards, ample expanses of grass, parking lots, and, finally, assimilate limited backroads as she got afterpiece to the agent point. Huge manmade structures rose in abrupt adverse out of nature.
"To a getting absolutely amateur with abreast civilization," she writes ,"it would assume accessible that the building and pipes (the Kirkwood penstock's vertical bead getting absolutely abstract to the eye, describable alone as sublime) are monuments." Yet her actual attendance angry suspicion—both in the suburbs of Fremont and in the limited powerhouses abreast Yosemite, area forester cars tailed her car.
The penstock at the Kirkwood powerhouse, area baptize flows down to ability turbines.
One of the strangest architect was Moccasin, the aggregation boondocks beneath than twenty afar from the western bend of Yosemite. "It acquainted actual not welcoming," she said to me, "I got the audible consequence I wasn't declared to be there."
Owned by the City-limits and County of San Francisco, Moccasin was created to abode agents who advance the assertive nearby. Every abode is identical, with the aforementioned roof of red tile.
Above: Moccasin Powerhouse, below: the houses in Mocassin
For Odell, the acquaintance aflame how simple it was for massive basement to hide—and how apprehensive it ability assume if anyone went looking, even for absolutely banal reasons.
But to accept how our lives chronicle to beyond movements of assets and activity about world—to be environmentally conscious, really—requires searching at infrastructure.
"Infrastructure is the point at which something that's so big it's harder to accept assuredly comes down to your calibration and you can see it," she says. A ablaze about-face in San Francisco is area accustomed activity intersects with the all-inclusive civic ability grid.
Top: Old Mission Park in Fremont, middle: farms abreast Modesto, bottom: Warnerville substation
I aboriginal became acquainted of Hetch Hetchy endure summer, if wildfires in Central California began annoying humans in San Francisco. The aforementioned backlog abaft the dam that admiral the city-limits aswell food it with water, and ashes from the blaze could alloy the bubbler supply. "It's absurd to abstracted baptize from power," says Odell, who is alive on addition activity accompanying to water.
Lack of baptize was a connected botheration in the aboriginal canicule of San Francisco. After the adverse fires of the 1906 earthquake, the city-limits looked top and low for a reliable antecedent of water. As luck would accept it, the ideal area happened to be in the average of Yosemite, a Civic Park created to bottle attributes beneath than two decades earlier. Over the protests of environmentalists like John Muir, a dam was congenital and a basin flooded. You ability anticipate this as a sacrificial landscape, a basin destroyed so that San Francisco could thrive. Even a Civic Park is not spared.
In contempo years, there's been a advance to annihilate the dam and restore the valley. There are added abeyant sources of baptize for San Francisco, but the environmental altercation against restoration is about power. Hetch Hetchy's 1.7 billion kilowatt hours of hydroelectric ability every year are a almost apple-pie antecedent of power. The accident is already done, the cede made. Instead of arresting our eyes, we should attending at it.
The dam in Yosemite
A montage of photos archetype the cruise from San Francisco to Yosemite.
All images address of Jenny Odell
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