The sun burst through the clouds to cast a shimmer onto Penitencia Creek's percolation ponds just as the governor rose to speak. It was July 1, 1965. Brown poured a vial of mercury into a miniature tank to complete an electrical circuit, which triggered the release of a cascade of water into a 2.5 million-gallon tank.
Water is critical to the semiconductor industry, which purifies tap water.
This super-clean water is then used in each step of the manufacturing process to cleanse the silicon wafers that will become computer chips. As far as ending the water crisis, the South Bay Aqueduct was just a beginning. Twenty-two years later, a second project brought water into the county from the San Joaquin Valley through Pacheco Pass in the San Felipe system of tunnels and pipelines. Half of water is brought in Those two water projects, along with San Francisco's Hetch Hetchy system that runs through the northern part of the county, today supply on average half the water Santa Clara County uses. The water comes from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Sierra Nevada.