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So, you want to build a city? You’re going to need rock, water, and people.
Building a civilization isn’t as easy as SimCity or Cities: Skylines would have you believe. Geology shapes where and why we build cities where we do: plate tectonics, faulting, and hydrology help form our aquifers, the topography of the ground upon which to build roads and housing, and where we build reservoirs. Surface and underground water supplies allow cities to thrive, or wither. And lastly, without people, there is no civilization. People make decisions born of the conditions of the time, and we learn from what worked and what didn’t work to build a better future. The East Bay area was officially founded in the 1850s, but its history was millions of years in the making to enable it to be what it is today, and it is continually evolving. From the Hayward Fault to alluvial fans to the more distant Sierra Nevada mountains, geology runs through everything and guided and shaped the development of the region. The area survived and thrived off underground waters—a seemingly bountiful resource never to run dry; however, the forces of nature and the actions of people forced the area to take a look elsewhere: Sierra surface waters.
This resulted in the creation of the East Bay Municipal Utility District, a public municipality, to tackle the geological and construction challenges of constructing and conveying water supplies nearly 100 miles away to civilization in the East Bay. Faced with unexpected geological conditions, Pardee Dam was revised at the last minute from a concrete arch dam to a concrete gravity dam. The Mokelumne Aqueducts have faced settlement of pipeline bents as the Delta continues to settle under natural processes and manmade processes such as groundwater depletion. Fault crossings pose significant risks to raw water distribution tunnels. Today, the erosion of the spillway channel is driven by the geological setting and is a site of concern warranting future improvements. Consequences arising out of under-designed dams and appurtenance structures have had to be reckoned with decades later at no small expense. Surface waters, once also thought to be bountiful and plentiful, are now changing thanks to climate change, and changing hydrometeorological conditions, coupled with human developments, are forcing us to go back underground to ensure the water supplies of generations to come.
Kyle Peterson received a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2011, followed by a Master of Science in Geotechnical Engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2013. He spent nine years in geotechnical consulting around the Bay Area and, since 2022, has held the position of Associate Civil Engineer at East Bay Municipal Utility District. He works in the Geotechnical Engineering and Dam Safety section and manages a $26 million capital improvements program for dam safety and dam upgrade projects. He is currently collaborating with the Center for Smart Infrastructure for the Pardee Unlined Spillway Channel Erodibility Study and Embankment Dam Fragility and Risk Assessment Studies projects.