A leak has developed in San Dieguito Dam, a 106-year-old structure in northern San Diego County that holds back Lake Hodges and supplies water to roughly 18,000 homes and businesses in Rancho Santa Fe, Solana Beach, and surrounding communities.
The Santa Fe Irrigation District (SFID), which manages the dam, is now seeking contractors to make repairs. The specific size and severity of the leak have not been disclosed publicly, but the fact that the district has moved to formal bidding signals that engineers view it as a problem that can't wait.
Dam leaks are taken seriously in California, and especially in the years since the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, which forced the evacuation of nearly 200,000 people in the Sierra Nevada foothills and prompted the state to accelerate inspections and repairs on aging structures statewide. California's Division of Safety of Dams conducts regular reviews and can require mandatory repair timelines when problems are identified. Even minor seepage can point to deeper issues: deteriorating concrete, shifting foundations, or failing internal drainage systems.
Source: NationGraph.
San Dieguito Dam was built in 1918 by the Santa Fe Land Improvement Company, placing it among hundreds of California dams now over 80 years old that require ongoing rehabilitation. The American Society of Civil Engineers has repeatedly given California's dam infrastructure poor marks, and the state has spent years trying to catch up on deferred maintenance.
The stakes at San Dieguito Dam extend beyond SFID's own service territory. Lake Hodges is connected to the broader regional water network through the Olivenhain-Hodges Pumped Storage Project, completed in 2012 by the San Diego County Water Authority. That facility links Lake Hodges with the reservoir behind Olivenhain Dam, allowing water to move between the two for storage flexibility and hydroelectric generation. San Diego County imports roughly 80 to 90 percent of its water supply, making every local reservoir more valuable, particularly during the repeated drought cycles the region has faced since 2012.
For SFID's ratepayers in one of California's wealthiest communities, the repair is a concrete reminder of how much of the state's water system runs on infrastructure built when Woodrow Wilson was president. The district has not released a cost estimate for the project. Contractor selection is the next step, with repairs expected to follow.
