Reber Plan

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.

[2] The San Francisco Chronicle endorsed the plan's concept of a causeway to replace or supplement the San Francisco Bay Bridge, stating: There are a great many difficulties to be surmounted, just as there were for the Bay and Golden Gate bridges, but they can be surmounted by application of the same kind of drive and technical know-how that brought the present great spans into being.

[4] 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.

[5][6][7][8] 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.