New Melones Dam
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New Melones Dam is a dam on the Stanislaus River and forms New Melones Lake. It replaced the previous Melones Dam.[1] It is located in the lower Sierra Nevada foothills near Jamestown in Tuolumne County in the U.S. state of California at .
The United States Bureau of Reclamation operates the dam. New Melones Dam's primary purpose is to provide water for irrigation. It is 625 feet (190 meters) tall rock-fill dam and holds back a reservoir with a capacity of 2,400,000 acre-feet (2,960,000 cubic meters). Construction was finished in 1979.
The dam has a hydroelectric plant with a capacity of 300 MW. It has three vertical Francis turbines and a head of 460 feet (140 meters). The plant has a low capacity factor and operates as a peaking facility, which means that it operates mostly during times of peak electricity demand.
[edit] Controversy
The dam was one of the last built in California, as the environmental movement gained support, and as such was fiercely opposed by groups such as the Sierra Club, as well as many individuals who saw the canyon of the Stanislaus River as having value far beyond a reservoir. On May 20, 1979, Mark Dubois hiked into the dam site and chained himself to a boulder in the dam's floodpath, intending to block the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from filling New Melones Lake. His protest action succeeded in temporarily securing a reprieve for the Class III whitewater rapids above the Parrott's Ferry Bridge. However, in 1982 the reservoir was finally allowed to reach full design capacity.
