The not-so-crystal-clean history of San Francisco’s drinking water
Tens of thousands of people flooded into San Francisco in the 1850s looking for gold, but there wasn’t nearly enough drinking water to quench the thirst of the boomtown. So speculators looked south of the city to San Mateo County in hopes of delivering clean water to San Francisco and big money to their own pockets. And they weren’t going to let anything get in their way.