Santa Clara County Awards $1.88 Billion to Rebuild Its Largest Dam

On July 24, the Santa Clara Valley Water District board awarded a $1.88 billion construction contract to Flatiron-Dragados-Sukut, a joint venture, to tear down and rebuild the 240-foot earthen Anderson Dam — the largest of the county’s 10 reservoirs, and the centerpiece of a seismic-safety effort that has been in various stages of planning for over a decade. The contract, announced publicly on July 28, covers what one industry publication calls one of the largest dam reconstruction projects in U.S. history, with a seven-year construction window beginning early 2027.

The dam was built in 1950 and has been the subject of seismic concerns for years. The urgency is specific: a failure during a major earthquake could send a 35-foot wall of water into the downstream city of Morgan Hill. FERC approved the reconstruction plan in June 2026, clearing the regulatory path for the district to move from engineering studies to actual construction.

The Anderson Reservoir behind the dam has long been central to Santa Clara County’s water supply, which makes the rebuild politically and logistically complicated in a way that purely structural projects rarely are. The district has to keep some level of water management functioning while demolishing and reconstructing the very infrastructure that creates the reservoir in the first place — a constraint that shapes the seven-year timeline.

There is a meaningful gap in how the total project cost is being reported. The Mercury News puts the overall price tag at $3.2 billion, while Engineering News-Record and the district’s own press release each cite approximately $2.8 billion. The $400 million difference likely reflects different scoping — land acquisition, environmental mitigation, and years of pre-construction engineering that predate the contract — but neither number is small, and the district’s figure, being the most recent from the agency actually managing the project, is the one worth watching.

Flatiron-Dragados-Sukut is a joint venture that brings together three firms with deep infrastructure portfolios: Flatiron, a major U.S. heavy-civil contractor; Dragados, the U.S. arm of Spanish construction giant ACS Group; and Sukut Construction, a California-based earthwork specialist. For a project that will require removing and rebuilding an entire earthen dam rather than reinforcing it in place, the combination makes engineering sense — the earthmoving scale alone is enormous.

Seven years is a long build, and the gap between contract award and the start of actual construction — the district says early 2027 — leaves time for the kind of pre-mobilization work that megaprojects often underestimate: environmental compliance, utility relocation, staging-area preparation, and the inevitable negotiations with downstream communities whose lives will be shaped by years of heavy construction traffic. The FERC approval in June was the last major regulatory hurdle, but

Sources

• Anderson Dam: Water district awards construction contract in $3.2 billion project to rebuild largest dam in Santa Clara County — Mercury News (San Jose)
• Californias $2.8B Anderson Dam Seismic Rebuild Moves Into Construction — Engineering News-Record ENR
• Valley Water reaches major milestone in rebuilding Anderson Dam — Santa Clara Valley Water District