Don Pedro Dam
The New Don Pedro Dam ( English Lake Don Pedro, Don Pedro Lake Don Pedro Reservoir or " Don Pedro Dam ") on the Tuolumne River is the fifth largest reservoir in California. In the vicinity of the dam, the city lies Moccasin.
In addition to the new larger Don Pedro Dam ( New Don Pedro Dam ) with a rockfill dam, which was built in 1971, there is still the old dam in 1923 with the Old Don Pedro Dam, a dam that is usually flooded.
The reservoir
The dam is at the foot of the Sierra Nevada. He has about 260 kilometers of shoreline, flooded about 42 km of river reaches of the Tuolumne River, and has a water surface of 53 km ². The storage space of about 2.5 km ³ is fed by a 3900 km ² large catchment area. The water is used by the Modesto Irrigation District (MID ) and the Turlock Irrigation District (TID ) for the irrigation of many hundreds of square kilometers of agricultural land in the fertile Central Valley. Sometimes the water is used by the MID after treatment as drinking water for Modesto. The two irrigation districts and the United States Bureau of Land Management ( BLM) own the land up to a height of 4.5 meters above the highest water level; therefore there are no private lands on lakeside pieces. There are only three public access points to the water.
The five largest reservoirs in California are measured at the storage room:
- 5.61 km ³ Lake Shasta
- 4.37 km ³ Lake Oroville
- 3.02 km ³ Trinity Lake
- 2.99 km ³ New Melones Lake
- 2.50 km ³ New Don Pedro (equivalent to 2.504 billion cubic meters, but the number is also specified with 2.835 billion )
Because of the Don Pedro Lake is not part of the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power system, water flows through this association tunnel under the upper end of the reservoir. The Don Pedro Lake could easily be included in this composite, and the efforts of the Restore Hetch Hetchy - group, drain the reservoir in the Hetch Hetchy Valley, strongly hope this possibility. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission ( SFPUC ), from the Hetch Hetchy Water and Power is a division, has taken 45 percent of the construction costs of the new Don Pedro Dam and therefore has the right to store 0.7 km ³ of water in it. The rights of the MID and TID are but older than that of the SFPUC, and therefore they can use up the stored water in dry periods for their purposes quite.
The new dam (New Don Pedro Dam )
The new New Don Pedro Dam is a 178 meter high earth and rockfill dam. It is 853 meters long and 579 meters wide at its base. It has a volume of 12 million cubic meters of bulk material from which comes a lot of old gold panning Halden on Tuolumne at La Grange. Construction began in September 1967, the dam was completed on May 28, 1970 and the inauguration was on 22 May 1971. During the TID hydroelectric power plant operates on Dammfuß, MID owns 31.54 percent of the power plant and may thus 63 of 203 MW, which are produced from four generators that use. The water leaving the plant, four kilometers flows downstream to La Grange Dam, where much of it is diverted into irrigation canals. The rest flows on the 84 km to the confluence with the San Joaquin River.
The old dam ( Old Don Pedro Dam )
The original Don Pedro Dam, ' known as the Old Don Pedro Dam since 1971, is a 86 meter high gravity dam, 305 meters long, five meters at the crown and at the base is 52 meters wide. It was in 1923 at one point completed (coordinates: 37.7125 N, 120.4020 W), on the Tuolumne River had carved a narrow canyon in the rock, about two kilometers downstream of Don Pedro Bar contained the old Lake Don Pedro up to 0.358 km ³ of water, which are 14.3 percent of current capacity. There was only a 15 kilowatt power plant, and two additional 7.5 -kW generators were added in 1926, so there were together 30 kilowatts. These are 0,015 meters of today's capacity. The old dam is 2.5 km above the new dam, and because the old mural crown is situated at only 177 meters above sea level, it is now about 76 feet of water when the memory is full. A report on the construction of The First Don Pedro is available on the MID website.