University Mound Reservoir

Reservoir

University Mound Reservoir (reservoir, run by the Public Utilities Commission): $1.8B budgeted for its department in FY2025, 2,679 employees on the payroll, 5 city documents at the Internet Archive, every figure linked to its source. University Mound is the reservoir the flat half of San Francisco drinks from. A 1935 account of the city's water and power describes it at elevation 172 feet with a capacity of 60 million gallons, supplying the lowest pressure zone — the waterfront, the industrial areas and the major business district — which together used about 40 percent of all the water consumed in the city; the water reached it from Crystal Springs through a 44-inch riveted wrought-iron pipeline seventeen miles long, built in 1885. Its enlargement was public works money: the Public Utilities Commission's report on the 1933 bond issue lists both the University Mound Reservoir Addition and a second Crystal Springs-University Mound pipeline among the contracts let under Public Works Administration Docket 1510, illustrated with construction views. The reservoir also has a cameo in one of the city's great legal fights — in the Spring Valley Water Company's suit against the city, an engineer's appraisal of the municipal reservoirs works its excavation out at 40 cents a yard and compacted fill at 25, and concludes flatly that "the University Mound Reservoir, in my opinion, is a steam shovel job". The health department was sampling its water at the intake, six feet below the surface, by 1908. A century later a regional reliability study still describes the city's distribution in two halves: the west side served from Sunset Reservoir, the east side from here. Source: SF Controller open data and the Internet Archive.