Sunset Reservoir

Sunset Reservoir is the western end of the city's water system, and its record runs from construction to a public quarrel about how it was planned. The Public Utilities Commission's report on the 1933 bond issue lists "Sunset Reservoir and Connecting Pipes" among the contracts let under Public Works Administration Docket 1510, and the history of the municipal water department traces the twenty-mile Sunset Pipeline, of 78- and 60-inch pipe, running through the Lake Merced Pumping Station to feed it. A 1957-58 water department report puts numbers to that: the Lake Merced pumps boosted an average of 24.8 million gallons a day off the Sunset Pipeline, 16.0 million of it to this reservoir and 8.8 million to Sutro. A 1979 environmental report for San Andreas Pipeline No. 3 proposed running a 66-inch main 62,200 feet from the filtration plant at Millbrae to the reservoir, partly because flows here were being reduced at peak demand by suburban users drawing on existing transmission capacity. By 2001 the commission's own capital programme was recording the North Basin's 1938 roof, its significant concrete expansion and its circulation problems. And when the Public Utilities Infrastructure Task Force reviewed a sample of the city's capital projects, it picked two — the Calaveras Dam and this reservoir — and concluded of the North Basin embankment, foundation stabilisation and seismic upgrade that the project "was not sensibly planned".