Have you done a lap around the reservoir lately and caught yourself stopping mid-stride to look at the tower? For as long as most people can remember, that concrete spire has punctuated every loop of the Lakeside Trail, the fixed point you check your pace against before the final stretch back to the parking lot. This year it looks different. There's a crane parked on a barge in the middle of the water, scaffolding wrapped around the top of the structure, and the tower itself is now shorter than it was in June. That's not a temporary repair waiting on a fresh coat of paint. EBMUD is permanently cutting 40 feet off the outlet tower, and the reason has less to do with anything happening in 2026 than with a mistake nobody caught in 1928.
A Dam That Slipped Before It Was Finished
Construction on the reservoir began in 1928, built as an earth-filled dam. The fill went in fast, faster than the clay foundation underneath could handle. As crews poured the concrete apron on top, the ground beneath it started sliding downhill, and the whole structure shifted roughly 26 feet in a matter of days that September. EBMUD's engineers had to redesign the project on the fly. They cut the reservoir's planned capacity to about a third of the original design and pushed the opening back three years, to 1933.
The outlet tower, though, had already gone up in 1929, built to the height the original, larger dam required. Once the dam got smaller, the tower didn't. It's been sized for a reservoir that was never built, standing 40 feet taller than it needed to be since before Lafayette residents were even allowed to swim, fish, or picnic there. Public recreation didn't open until 1966. The mismatch was already 37 years old by then.
Why This Became Urgent After Oroville
For most of the tower's life, that extra height was a curiosity, the kind of detail that made the reservoir's silhouette distinctive. It became a safety question after the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis, when California's Division of Safety of Dams tightened its standards across the state. The tower serves as the reservoir's spillway and connects to the dam's only drain system. Current seismic studies found that in a major earthquake, the tower could bend or crack, which would damage the conduits at its base and take away EBMUD's ability to release water from the reservoir in a controlled way.
State flood maps of what an uncontrolled release would look like are not abstract. They show water reaching a K-8 school, the Lafayette Police Department, and the Lafayette BART station, with flooding extending into Walnut Creek. As EBMUD's Christopher Tritto put it when asked why the agency is moving forward now, "That's never happened, and we want to make sure it never happens."
The Residents Who Almost Talked EBMUD Out of It
What most people walking the trail this summer probably don't know is that this outcome wasn't a formality. When EBMUD first presented the shortened-tower concept to the Lafayette City Council, the response was pointed enough that the Council formed a Citizen's Advisory Committee, made up of residents with real structural engineering backgrounds, to do an independent review. In July 2023, that committee reported back with a different conclusion: the tower could be retrofitted at its existing height and still meet seismic requirements.
The Council accepted the finding and sent EBMUD a letter asking the agency to reconsider. EBMUD's answer came that November: the taller design had been reviewed and wouldn't meet state requirements. The two sides kept talking through early 2024, with the committee submitting a follow-up report in February, an in-person meeting with EBMUD and its engineering consultant AECOM in March, and a final report in May concluding that shortening the tower could actually increase seismic risk to downstream residents rather than reduce it. The Council directed its city manager to ask EBMUD to pause the project and to appeal directly to the state dam-safety regulator.
None of it changed the outcome. The regulator's position held, and the 40-foot cut is the plan that's now underway.
What the Loop Looks Like Right Now
If you want to know what all of that looks like on the ground this summer, here's the practical picture:
- EBMUD installed protective netting around the tower in early February to keep swallows from nesting there before demolition began. The agency says the birds will be able to return once construction wraps.
- Scaffolding now fully wraps the tower, and demolition is visible from most points around the water.
- Crews used a crane mounted on a floating barge to begin removing the top of the structure on July 10, cutting through roughly a dozen concrete rings, each about 3 feet tall.
- EBMUD reported no vehicle closures planned for July, though expect intermittent flagging at the entrance for equipment and debris trucks as work continues.
- Work is limited to weekdays, so weekend laps around the loop are largely undisturbed.
- A separate project replacing the recreation area's aging wastewater system runs on an overlapping timeline through fall 2026, which is why the footprint near the Lakeside Trail and the barge ramp feels busier than usual right now.
- Picnic site reservations have been paused since February and are expected to reopen in stages as EBMUD's schedule firms up.
EBMUD has also said it salvaged pieces of the original 1929 structure, including a window installed in the late 1920s, and that the new metal operating house is designed to closely echo the current lookout, so the tower should still read as itself from across the water, just shorter.
Locals Are Still Deciding How They Feel
Ask around the reservoir this summer and you'll get some version of the same mixed reaction. Glen Pineda, who visits often to walk the loop, put it simply: "It's kind of sad to see the change, but from a practical, seismic standpoint, I think it probably needed to be done." His husband Juan took a lighter view of the same moment, joking about the tower's newly missing top, "They took the cap off," pulling off his own ballcap with a laugh.
Both reactions are fair. The tower has been a fixed point on this loop for generations of runners, walkers, and photographers, and it's not unreasonable to feel something about watching it change, even while understanding why.
The Race Still Runs the Same Loop
Crews are targeting the end of October to finish the tower-specific work, which puts the timeline close to another fixture on the same trail: the Lafayette Res Run for Education, scheduled for October 18. Runners can choose a 2-mile, a 5k, a 10k, or the full Reservoir Challenge, and last year's race put $37,611.32 toward local schools. This fall, the same paved loop that's carried construction trucks and barge equipment all summer will carry a school fundraiser instead, circling a tower that will look different than it has for anyone who's run that race before.
That's the part worth sitting with. The shrinking tower isn't a cosmetic update or a regulatory overreaction. It's a construction-era mismatch from 1928 finally getting corrected on a safety timeline that residents, even organized and armed with their own engineering findings, couldn't slow down. The loop keeps doing what it's always done. The skyline it frames just changed.
If you're thinking about your own place near the reservoir, whether it's time to sell, buy, or simply understand what your home is worth in a neighborhood that's still writing its own history one construction season at a time, Jill Fusari is happy to talk it through. Request a confidential home valuation whenever you're ready.
