Trek Through An Indoor Model Of The San Francisco Bay With Real Tides And Currents
San Francisco Bay helps define San Francisco. It helps draw in the fog that the city is known for, and it is home to iconic landmarks like Alcatraz Island and the Golden Gate Bridge. It has also inspired artists and musicians of all kinds, like Otis Redding, who wrote "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" while in Sausalito, which is known as the "Venice of the West." This city is also home to the Bay Model Visitor Center, which offers a unique way to watch the famous San Francisco Bay tide roll in.
This U.S. Army Corps of Engineers site features a massive 3D model of the San Francisco Bay and its connection to the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. It is in a warehouse since it sprawls over 1.5-acres, and it is hydraulically operated to show how water moves throughout the region, including the tides coming in and out.
San Francisco Bay is one of the world's largest estuaries — where saltwater and freshwater meet — and it can be difficult to wrap your head around the enormity of this movement of water from the Sierra Nevada Mountains down into the ocean. But after you visit the Bay Model, you'll come away with a far greater understanding of how all these different water systems work together. It's free to get in, and it's open Tuesday through Saturday, and every Saturday at 11 a.m. you can take a 45-minute guided tour of the model.
Why the San Francisco Bay model was built
As cool as this model of the San Francisco Bay is, it wasn't built just for tourists to come and learn more about Northern California waterways. It was built it in 1957 as a way to determine if filling in parts of the bay would be a good idea. Dramatically altering this body of water may seem borderline nonsensical now, but there were some popular proposals in the 1940s to utterly transform it. One of those was known as the Reber Plan, as it was spearheaded by John Reber, and included damming parts of the bay to create freshwater lakes, installing roadways and railways, and filling in other parts of the bay entirely.
In order to determine what repercussions the Reber Plan, or any others, would have on the waterways in the area, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built this working model. It was able to scientifically show what would happen if such drastic alterations took place, and long story short — it would be a bad idea. You won't see anything else like it, as simulations like this would now be made on a computer.
After a stop at the Bay Model Visitor Center, you'll have a better appreciation for things like the scenic ferry ride between Sausalito and San Francisco. You'll know that everything you're seeing could have been lost without that massive 3D model. For more sweeping views of San Francisco Bay, visit Hawk Hill in the nearby Marin Headlands, which also happens to be one of the locations on the Bay Model.