Wednesday, March 13, 2019

San Pablo Reservoir - Contra Costa County, California




Visited on 3/10/2019, Jeff and I took a drive with our pups, Summer and Skye to the San Francisco Bay Area to take a tour of all of the lakes in Contra Costa County and a couple in Alameda County.  Our first stop was San Pablo Reservoir.  This body of water is an open cut terminal water storage reservoir owned and operated by the East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD). It is tucked in the beautiful valley of San Pablo Creek, north of Orinda, California  and south of El Sobrante and Richmond, east of the Berkeley Hills between San Pablo Ridge and Sobrante Ridge.

The earthen San Pablo Dam was built in 1919 and is located on the west end and the El Sobrante end of the reservoir, above Kennedy Grove. The reservoir is located at 305 feet above sea level and is 854 surface acres in size.  A water tunnel runs under the hills to the west from the reservoir to a pumping plant in Kensington. The San Pablo Dam Road runs along the west side of the reservoir. EBMUD's Briones Reservoir is in the hills southeast of the San Pablo Reservoir and drains into the reservoir. Although the dam impounds the waters of San Pablo Creek, the great bulk of its water is imported via the Mokelumne Aqueduct from Pardee Reservoir located over a hundred miles to the east in the Sierra Nevada foothills.

EBMUD owns and maintains the San Pablo Reservoir Recreation Area, which consists of boating and fishing access to the reservoir itself, and some watershed land on the west side of the reservoir. Because this reservoir is a storage facility for drinking water, swimming and wading are prohibited. Fishing, boating, and canoeing are allowed. However, to reduce the possibility of gasoline components in the reservoir, only four-cycle engines using MTBE-free gasoline are allowed.
San Pablo Reservoir was the potential venue for the rowing and canoe races in the case that San Francisco would host the 2024 Summer Olympics.




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