California State Water Project

The California State Water Project, commonly known as the SWP, is the world's largest publicly built and still intact water and power development and conveyance system. The SWP is operated by the California Department of Water Resources ( DWR ). The original purpose of the project was to divert water in the arid Southern California, where appropriate local water resources are missing in order to provide for their growth. Today, the SWP provides drinking water for over 23 million people and generates an annual average of 6.5 million MWh from hydropower.

The construction began in the late 1950s, the main actions were adopted in 1960 on funds from income securities. The votes on the debt securities split California when the Northern Californians to the means opposed because they saw it as a boondoggle and an attempt to steal their water. Most of the water ( about 80 percent) is earmarked for agriculture, mainly for the San Joaquin Valley, now pumping the water over the Tehachapi Mountains is costly and Southern California has other water sources - such as the Owens River, tributaries to Mono Lake and the Colorado River.

The most important buildings of the project include the Oroville Dam, the San Luis Reservoir and the California Aqueduct. In dry years, water was pumped from the Sacramento River Delta, which is a threat to salmon that spawn normally directed by the currents in the Pacific, but instead fall into the pump. This and other water use and environmental problems led in 1994 to the establishment of the CALFED Bay - Delta Program or CALFED short.

In May 1972, Reader's Digest published an article on the SWP, which stated that it was the only two man-made (next to the Chinese Wall) objects is that you can see from space.

List of plants of the SWP

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