To some, the o'shaughnessy dam is a monument to the skills of the Irish-American engineer who built it. Elegant is the word that Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, uses to describe the curved wedge of rock and concrete that soars 300 ft. above the floor of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. But to others, the dam, constructed nearly a century ago inside the western boundary of Yosemite National Park, is a mocking tombstone to a landscape whose haunting beauty has lain for too long beneath 100 billion gallons of water. Might the O'Shaughnessy Dam one day be dismantled and that drowned landscape conjured back into being? That is the provocative question posed by an activist group called Restore Hetch Hetchy, which five years ago launched a spirited but seemingly quixotic campaign to convince the public that the time has come to get rid of the unnatural bone lodged in the valley's throat. "This was done by people, and it can be undone by people," says Restore Hetch Hetchy's executive director Ron Good.
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