Reber Plan

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John Reber was an actor, theatrical producer, and schoolteacher who designed and advocated a plan to fill in the San Francisco Bay in the late 1940s. Under the plan, which was known as the San Francisco Bay Project or the Reber Plan, the Sacramento River mouth from Suisun Bay would be channelized by dams and would feed two freshwater lakes within the bay, providing drinking water to the residents of the bay area. The barriers would support rail and highway traffic and would create two vast freshwater lakes, supplying irrigation water to farms. Between the lakes, Reber proposed the reclamation of 20,000 acres (81 km²) 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.^[1]

In 1953 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 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.