Maryland Daily Photo

When I told people I was going to the Loch Raven Reservoir to take some pictures, the general response was: “Don’t fall in this time.”  So I did listen and did not fall into the reservoir this time around.  

For those who are unfamiliar with Loch Raven Reservoir, it is one of three reservoirs in Baltimore County, all three of which are owned by the Baltimore City.   What you are looking at is only a small part of the 23 Billion gallons of water that the reservoir can hold.   (while Prettyboy reservoir can hold a roughly equal amount of water, Liberty reservoir can hold nearly double that capacity. 

When the reservoir’s dam was built in 1914 ( only to be enlarged within a decade) it caused the town of Warren to be completely flooded.  In fact, the town of warren was a serious point of contention during the planning phase of the reservoir.   I’ll leave the history of the town of Warren for a future post when I have better accompanying visual aids.    

In anycase, water from this reservoir is sent directly through a tunnel to lake Montebello in the city, which around the late 19th century had become a defacto reservoir.   From lake Montebello and its sister reservoir/filtration station in Druid hill, water is pumped or gravity fed to the system.   If you are following on a map, you might be saying that its weird for water to go all the way from the reservoir to the city and then back north to customers.  Well that is weird, and that’s why most of the homes in the area surrounding the reservoir use wells and receive no public water supply.   Here’s a map

One more fact for you, which is something I didn’t know until just about 5 minutes ago.  Apparently, there is an emergency conduit that can pump 150 million gallons from the susquehanna river all the way to Baltimore in case of severe drought.