"They took the cap off," a regular at the reservoir told a CBS News Bay Area reporter this summer, laughing as he pulled off his own baseball cap to make the point. He wasn't exaggerating. For decades, the runners, walkers, and cyclists who circle the reservoir on their daily laps have used the tower as their landmark, the thing you glance at to gauge how far you've come. This year it looks different. A chunk of the top is gone, sawed away in sections and hauled out by barge, and the tower that has stood over the water since the late 1920s is now forty feet shorter than it was in June.
If you've noticed the change and wondered whether Lafayette is quietly losing one of its oldest landmarks, the short answer is no. The longer answer, and the one that actually matters if you're walking past the barge ramp this month, involves a seismic risk finding, a decade of back and forth between the city and the utility that owns the reservoir, and a design compromise that will determine exactly what sits on top of that tower once the new operating house goes on this winter.
The Physical Work Underway Right Now
Crews working for the East Bay Municipal Utility District began cutting the tower down in early July 2026. Using a crane mounted on a floating barge, they first removed the existing operating house at the top, then started saw-cutting roughly a dozen concrete rings off the tower stem, each about three feet tall. By the third week of August, the tower had reached its new, shortened height, down from an original 170 feet.
EBMUD spokesperson Tracie Morales described the work simply: crews are "lowering the height of this tower by 40 feet to make it seismically safe." Demolition debris is being trucked out using the Acalanes Road on-ramp, a route EBMUD chose specifically because it avoids sending construction traffic through downtown Lafayette. No roads into the park have closed for the project, though flaggers remain stationed at the main entrance to manage equipment moving in and out.
Why The Tower Had To Change At All
The reservoir isn't currently used for drinking water, it's held in reserve as an emergency backup supply for the region, but the tower plays a critical role regardless. It functions as the dam's spillway and outlet, the only way to safely drain or regulate water levels if something goes wrong. Seismic studies found that in a major earthquake, the tall, aging structure could bend or break, potentially blocking the spillway and sending water downstream toward Lafayette and Walnut Creek. Scrutiny of dam infrastructure across California intensified after the 2017 Oroville Dam crisis, and the state's Division of Safety of Dams has treated the Lafayette tower as, in the words of one EBMUD spokesperson, "a critical structure for dam safety" ever since.
The Decade The Tower Spent Being Argued Over
What's easy to miss on a Saturday walk is how long this has been in motion. EBMUD has coordinated with the city on the tower's future since 2015. When EBMUD presented three design options to the Lafayette City Council in 2017, two of them would have preserved the tower's original height. According to EBMUD's own account, the council favored shortening it at the time, since that option eliminated the hazard outright rather than working around it.
That agreement didn't hold. In 2023, a citizen committee reviewing the plan concluded that the tower could be retrofitted at its existing height, and the City Council backed the committee's position, asking EBMUD to reconsider. EBMUD and its engineering consultant met with the committee multiple times over the following months. In November 2023, EBMUD informed the city that the tall-tower concept had been reviewed again and still didn't meet seismic requirements. The state's Division of Safety of Dams had already approved the shortened design back in 2021, which is part of why the five years between that approval and the first crane arriving on site can feel like nothing happened when, in fact, the city spent most of it trying to change the outcome.
The Concession That Keeps The Landmark Recognizable
Here's the part that changes how you should read the construction happening right now. When the Division of Safety of Dams approved the shortened design in 2021, EBMUD agreed to work with the community on the tower's appearance. The replacement operating house going on top of the shortened structure is built to closely resemble the original hundred-year-old design, not a modern steel box that reads as new construction. EBMUD has also said it's looking at ways to salvage pieces of the removed concrete for some kind of commemorative marker, though no formal plan has been announced yet.
So the tower isn't disappearing. It's being rebuilt at a lower height with a lookalike cap, engineered to survive an earthquake that the original couldn't. The version you'll see by next year will look, at a glance, close to the one generations of Lafayette residents have walked past for a hundred years. It just won't be tall enough to fail the way the old one could.
What To Expect On Your Next Loop
A few practical points for anyone still using the trails through the rest of this fall:
- Work is limited to weekdays, so weekend visits should see little disruption from the construction itself.
- No vehicular closures are planned. Flagging continues at the park entrance to manage equipment and debris trucks.
- Expect ongoing construction noise near the Lakeside Nature Trail and the barge ramp area through the remainder of fall 2026, with occasional 10 to 15 minute delays where crews move materials across the trail.
- The new metal operating house is targeted for completion by November 2026. Full operational status for the tower, including new underwater slide gates, won't happen until fall 2027, since that underwater work has to wait for the next permitted environmental work window in spring 2027.
- Picnic site reservations tied to the construction footprint were paused earlier this year, from February through July 2026. Sites outside the work zones have continued to operate on a first-come, first-served basis in the meantime.
- Trout stocking resumes in November, which means the reservoir's other seasonal rhythm picks back up right as the tower work pauses for the winter.
By the time the trout trucks arrive in November, the tower on the ridge above the parking lot will be forty feet shorter, wearing a cap built to look like the one it lost, and doing the same job it has done since the 1920s, just with a much better chance of still doing that job after the next major earthquake.
If you're weighing a move to Lafayette and want someone who tracks the details behind the headlines, not just the listings, Emon Komeily pays close attention to what's actually changing around town. Let's Connect.
