The Reber Plan was a late 1940s plan to fill in parts of the
San Francisco Bay
San Francisco Bay is a large tidal estuary in the U.S. state of California, and gives its name to the San Francisco Bay Area. It is dominated by the big cities of San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland.
San Francisco Bay drains water from a ...
. It was designed and advocated by John Reber—an actor, theatrical producer, and schoolteacher.
San Francisco Bay Project
Under the plan, which was also known as the San Francisco Bay Project, the mouth of the
Sacramento River
The Sacramento River ( es, Río Sacramento) is the principal river of Northern California in the United States and is the largest river in California. Rising in the Klamath Mountains, the river flows south for before reaching the Sacramento–S ...
(from
Suisun Bay
Suisun Bay ( ; Wintun for "where the west wind blows") is a shallow tidal estuary (a northeastern extension of the San Francisco Bay) in Northern California. It lies at the confluence of the Sacramento River and San Joaquin River, forming the ent ...
) would be channelized by dams and would feed two vast freshwater lakes within the bay, providing drinking and irrigation water to the residents and farmers of the
Bay Area
The San Francisco Bay Area, often referred to as simply the Bay Area, is a populous region surrounding the San Francisco, San Pablo, and Suisun Bay estuaries in Northern California. The Bay Area is defined by the Association of Bay Area Gov ...
. The barriers would support rail and highway traffic and would create the two freshwater lakes. Between the lakes, Reber proposed the reclamation of of land that would be crossed by a freshwater channel. West of the channel would be airports, a naval base, and a pair of locks comparable in size to those of the Panama Canal. Industrial plants would be developed on the east.
The ''
San Francisco Chronicle
The ''San Francisco Chronicle'' is a newspaper serving primarily the San Francisco Bay Area of Northern California. It was founded in 1865 as ''The Daily Dramatic Chronicle'' by teenage brothers Charles de Young and M. H. de Young, Michael H. de ...
'' endorsed the plan's concept of a
causeway
A causeway is a track, road or railway on the upper point of an embankment across "a low, or wet place, or piece of water". It can be constructed of earth, masonry, wood, or concrete. One of the earliest known wooden causeways is the Sweet Tra ...
to replace or supplement the
San Francisco Bay Bridge, stating:
Feasibility tested
In 1953 the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
, colors =
, anniversaries = 16 June (Organization Day)
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, battles_label = Wars
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, commander1 = ...
recommended more detailed study of the plan and eventually constructed
a hydraulic model of the Bay Area to test it. The barriers, which were the plan's essential element, failed to survive this critical study. The scrapping of the Reber Plan in the early 1960s was one sign, perhaps, of the end of an era of grandiose civil works projects aimed at totally restructuring a region's natural environment, and the birth of the environmental era.
[https://psmag.com/environment/the-fitness-of-physical-models-38084 December 5, 2011 The Fitness of Physical Models]
See also
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Atlantropa
Atlantropa, also referred to as Panropa, was a gigantic engineering and colonisation idea that was devised by the German architect Herman Sörgel in the 1920s, and promoted by him until his death in 1952. The project was devised to contain seve ...
References
External links
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History of the San Francisco Bay Area
San Francisco Bay
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