California Water News Daily Your Source For Water News in California
The Bureau of Reclamation broke ground Friday on the B.F. Sisk Dam Safety Modification Project at the San Luis Reservoir. The billion-dollar project will retrofit the B.F. Sisk Dam to protect it from future seismic events. Construction will include stability berms and other engineered features.
“B.F. Sisk Dam and San Luis Reservoir are representative of Reclamation’s legacy of effective resource management,” said Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton. “The work being done here today—funded by the transformative Bipartisan Infrastructure Law—is emblematic of our commitment to modernize water infrastructure. So, it is fitting to break ground here once again and invest in our infrastructure and in the future of California.”
B.F. Sisk Dam is a 380-foot-high zoned compacted earthfill embankment located on the west side of California’s Central Valley 12 miles west of Los Banos, California. The dam is more than 3.5 miles long and impounds San Luis Reservoir which has a total capacity of more than 2 million acre-feet.
The dam was built between 1963 and 1967 to provide supplemental irrigation water storage for the federal Central Valley Project (CVP) and municipal and industrial water for the California State Water Project (SWP).
This is Reclamation’s largest project under the 1978 Safety of Dams Act.
