Monticello Dam: Tear it down and build it bigger?
The rumor of raising Monticello Dam has been around for decades. Where did this rumor start and why does it pop up every now and again? According to the Solano County Water Agency, CalFed, a collaboration among 25 state and federal agencies, did a “brainstorming” survey many years go of every potential future water project in northern California.
Although raising Monticello Dam made the original list of possible projects, after practical criteria such as cost, safety, flooding adjacent property, were applied to screen the list down to real opportunities, raising the dam was dropped from the list. It has never been discussed seriously since then. It is NOT in any plan and never will be.
But there is another potential source to this rumor, and it was a much more ambitious project than just raising the dam.
According to “The Solano Water Story” published by the Solano Irrigation District, banner headlines in California's newspapers in September, 1963 announced Governor Edmund G. Brown's startling new state water plan in which Berryessa would have a major role.
The $3.7 billion plan included 35 dams, 70 miles of tunnels, 10 pumping plants, and 15 power-plants. The time-table called for start-up in 1976 and completion about 2020.
According to the plan, the still-young, 304-foot high Monticello Dam would he removed, rather than letting it remain as an underwater barrier. It would he replaced with a 650-foot high earth and rockfill dam a mile downstream from the concrete arch dam. The new reservoir would be three times larger than Lake Berryessa, with 10 times its capacity or 16 million acre-feet (compared with Shasta's 4.5 million acre-feet).
The enlarged lake would extend into Pope Valley almost as far as Aetna Springs in Napa County and into Capell Valley, taking nearly 18,000 acres of agricultural and grazing land out of production. Estimated cost of the Greater Berryessa Project, as it was called, was put at $360 million by the State Department of Water Resources (DWR). The timetable for this part of the project indicated a start-up in about 1990.
In essence, the idea was to integrate the Greater Berryessa Project with the $280 million Clear Lake Diversion Project. The latter included three dams on the Middle Fork of the Eel River, with tunnels to the Main Eel River, Russian River, and Clear Lake to Putah Creek, then through two more dams and Lake Berryessa to the Sacramento River. From Clear Lake, the water would be diverted by a two-mile tunnel to Soda Creek in the Upper Putah Creek basin.
According to the DWR, discharges from the power facilities would be released into an enlarged Lake Berryessa capable of meeting the export demands of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and those of the Solano Project.
Even the Bureau of Reclamation, which had never been accused of thinking small, was impressed by the scope of Governor Brown's plan, describing the overall project as "staggering but physically possible and since the Greater Berryessa Project would not be built for at least another 30 years, the present Monticello Dam by that time will have served its useful life."
Brown's master plan for the state's water problems never caught on with the public or the legislature. His grand plans are collecting dust at the DWR. The number one project on the list continues to be Sites, east of Maxwell. Those of you who are ATV/dirt bike/jet ski enthusiasts have probably gone to Stonyford or East Park Reservoir to ride. You’ve driven through Sites and seen the narrow canyon at the brown rock quarry where a dam similar to Monticello Dam could be built.