2015 “Water Issue” Escondido Magazine has many stories about the current water situation in San Diego. Here is one of the featured stories intro… Got Lakes? How Escondido came to claim 1/5th of San Diego County’s Lakes.
Did you know there are only 15 lakes in San Diego County? And lucky us, we’ve got three of them. That’s right, we claim 1/5 of all the lakes in the county. How refreshing!
Like the vast majority of lakes in the USA, all three of ours are manmade reservoirs. First there was Lake Escondido. In 1894, the community passed a $450,000 bond to build a reservoir to provide water for the young agricultural community. Construction of the Bear Valley Dam began late that year. An ambitious undertaking, seven camps were set up for men to live in along the ditch line they were making to transport water to the city, with another, much larger camp set up for the 75 men who built the dam. Finished in 1895, it took five years to fill Lake Escondido. For the first time, Escondido had
