Visited on 4/16/2018 while traveling back from the Central Coast of California for a work assignment and a weekend trip to Avila Beach with Jeff and the dogs, we stopped off Interstate 5 to visit O’Neill Forebay on our way home. O’Neill Forebay is a 2,250 acre lake with 14 miles of shoreline located at the base of San Luis Reservoir. The lake is at an elevation of 38 feet above sea level. O'Neill Forebay is a forebay to the San Luis Reservoir created by the construction of O'Neill Dam across San Luis Creek approximately 12 miles west of Los Banos, California, United States, on the eastern slopes of the Pacific Coast Ranges of Merced County.
Roughly 2.5 miles downstream
from the San Luis Dam, O'Neill Forebay collects irregular water releases from
the San Luis Dam and William R. Gianelli Powerplant in its basin. A
morning-glory type spillway lies at the left bank of the reservoir. The
reservoir is fed by the California Aqueduct and the Delta–Mendota Canal. Water
from the Delta–Mendota Canal is lifted a vertical distance of 8 ft into a
channel running 2,200 feet into the forebay.
O'Neill Dam,
constructed from 1963 to 1967, is an 87.5 feet, earthfill and rockfill dam,
stretching over 3 miles across the valley of San Luis Creek. With a maximum
reservoir depth of 57 feet, peak inflow to the forebay is 15,600 cubic feet per
second, from both the San Luis Dam and the Delta–Mendota Canal. Drainage area
of the reservoir downstream of the San Luis Dam is only 18 acres.
The
California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) has
developed an advisory for O'Neill Forebay because of mercury and PCBs found in
fish caught from this water body. The advisory[3] provides safe eating advice
for multiple fish species. Notably, the largest striped bass caught in
California was caught in the O’Neill Forebay it was over 67 pounds!
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