[Water_news] 4. DWR'S CALIFORNIA WATER NEWS: WATER QUALITY - 8/27/07

Department of Water Resources

California Water News

A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment

 

August 27, 2007

 

4. Water Quality

 

WATER RECYCLING:

Guest Column: Revisiting 'toilet to tap'; This time around, Los Angeles can't afford to let recycled water slip through its fingers - Los Angeles Times

 

WATER QUALITY ISSUES:

Guest Column: California's real water war - San Francisco Chronicle

 

 

WATER RECYCLING:

Guest Column: Revisiting 'toilet to tap'; This time around, Los Angeles can't afford to let recycled water slip through its fingers

Los Angeles Times – 8/26/07

By Marc B. Haefele, commentator for KPCC and writes for Citybeat, Citywatch and Nomada magazine of Buenos Aires and Anna Sklar, former NPR reporter and former public affairs director for the city Department of Public Works

 

Los Angeles' water supplies are getting lower. The once-desolate Owens River Valley burst into flower this year because the Department of Water and Power brought less water to the city. Other states are increasing the amount of water they are able to tap from the Colorado River, L.A.'s primary source of water. And this has been the city's driest year on record. In response, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has called for greater water conservation to help meet future needs.

Given this scary situation, the DWP earlier this month asked a handful of private contractors how to promote "recycled water planning" and, in the words of DWP representative Carol Tucker, "to explore all options with our stakeholders for recycling water." Tucker insisted that turning sewage into tap water was not part of the plan, and other DWP officials have echoed her message.

But the water agency's request for ideas about recycling was explicit. It spoke of "indirect potable reuse," which means restocking groundwater with purified wastewater.

Sound vaguely familiar?

It should. Los Angeles has been there -- and then backed off. This time it should stay the course.

The new study might cost $1.5 million, but most of the needed equipment already exists. It's called the East Valley Water Reclamation Project.

Built in the 1990s at a cost of $55 million, it was used for a few days then shut down seven years ago. As DWP engineer Bill Van Wagoner put it, "We spent slightly under $1 million per acre foot (of water produced) before we had to shut it off." That comes down to about $2.75 a gallon -- as opposed to the fraction of a cent per gallon usually paid by DWP customers.

The problem? "Indirect potable reuse" got a bad new name: "toilet to tap."

Public hearings on the reclamation project's safety were held in 1995. The Los Angeles City Council then greenlighted it unanimously after the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, the state Department of Health Services and the state Environmental Protection Agency also approved the proposal.

It worked this way: Sewage was treated at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys and then pumped to spreading fields near Hansen Dam, where, over five years, it would filter through sandy soil and gravel into an underground reservoir.

But what should have been an engineering triumph soon became a PR disaster.

For five years after its approval, the reclamation project was largely forgotten. Then came the official DWP announcement of its completion in 2000, just before an open mayoral contest in 2001 that included Valley secession on the ballot. The water agency could not have chosen a more inopportune moment.

The new pipeline, providing enough treated water for 120,000 L.A. homes, was greeted by protest. State Sen. Richard Alarcon, who had approved it when he was a council member, now objected. He was swiftly joined by Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, credited with popularizing the "toilet to tap" tag. Opposition snowballed.

Mayoral candidate and Valley council member Joel Wachs, who also had approved the plan in 1995, cried foul in 2000: "Go tell somebody in North Hollywood that they have to drink toilet water but the mayor [Richard Riordan] won't have to drink it in [his] Brentwood [home]."

Wachs was utterly wrong. East Valley groundwater, like all the city's groundwater, is moved from Hollywood to downtown to Silver Lake and even to the Westside, "depending on supply, need and the way the system goes," Tucker said.

At the time, the DWP insisted that the treated water from the Tillman plant was almost potable, and when it reached the water agency's Valley wells, it would have a purity indistinguishable from unpolluted rainwater.

Few listened, however. City Atty. James K. Hahn, planning his own mayoral run, discretely ordered the recycling project shuttered for no other visible reason than the public protest. As mayor, he later reaffirmed his order, and the DWP promptly ran and hid from water recycling.

Back then and now, however, water treated at the city's main Hyperion wastewater plant goes into other cities' water supplies. It flows into aquifers supplying Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, Redondo Beach and Torrance, courtesy of the West Basin Water Recycling Facility. The water supply of thousands of other Los Angeles County residents also includes highly treated wastewater.

This is because modern water-purification technology is considered totally reliable. It uses micro-filtration and reverse osmosis, which pumps water through permeable membranes, and ultraviolet light to remove all contaminants. The "yuck factor" is now completely imaginary.

Orange County just opened its own half-billion-dollar reclamation program -- almost four times the size of the East Valley project -- with minimal public opposition. The secret of this success? Transparency.

"We started telling people from the start that we're purifying sewage water," said Ron Wildermuth, district communications director, for the Orange County Water District.

The district also mounted a substantial public education campaign that should become a model for the DWP's plan to relaunch its own ill-publicized recycling program. By November, Orange County's water reclamation plant daily will supply up to 500,000 people with 70 million gallons of treated water.

Every day, the outflow of L.A.'s treated wastewater -- about 400 million-plus gallons -- amounts to the state's fifth-largest river running into the Pacific Ocean.

In these dry times, it makes perfect sense to stop throwing it away.

Marc B. Haefele is a commentator for KPCC and writes for Citybeat, Citywatch and Nomada magazine of Buenos Aires. Anna Sklar is a former NPR reporter and former public affairs director for the city Department of Public Works. She is the author of "Black Acres," a history of the city sewer system. #

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-haefele26aug26,1,5638726.story?coll=la-news-comment

 

 

WATER QUALITY ISSUES:

Guest Column: California's real water war

San Francisco Chronicle – 8/27/07

Laurel Firestone, co-director of the Community Water Center, based in Visalia and Amy Vanderwarker, outreach coordinator for the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, based in Oakland

 

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, environmentalists and water districts have waded hip-deep into arguments over new dams, pricey canals and other ways to manage future water wars in California.

 

But the looming water crisis that the governor warns of is already here.

 

Hundreds of small, rural communities throughout California's agricultural heartland have no access to clean, safe drinking water. It's a public health crisis that threatens California families every day.

 

According to the state Department of Public Health, public drinking water systems deliver water with unsafe levels of contaminants to approximately 1 million people. The vast majority of this tainted water flows to the Central Valley - to little-known towns such as Monterey Park Tract, Mendota, Parlier, East Orosi, Cutler and Alpaugh - where residents can't fill a glass of tap water without fear of cancer, kidney disease and other health problems. These are some of our state's poorest towns, where median household incomes hover around $18,000. But they pay some of the highest water rates in California - 2 to 6 percent of their household income - for undrinkable water.

 

In 2004 alone, tens of thousands of Central Valley residents received bright orange notices from their public drinking water systems saying their water was not safe to drink and exceeded legal contaminant levels. Many Central Valley residents drive 30 to 50 miles each week just to buy bottled water, effectively doubling the price for this basic need.

 

More than 90 percent of Central Valley communities depend on water stored underground for their drinking water.

 

Unfortunately, years of intensive farming with uncontrolled chemical use has heavily poisoned that source. Recent groundwater sampling in Tulare County found that 3 out of 4 homes with private wells have contaminated water that is unsafe to drink.

 

California's agricultural heartland offers a bounty of crops, from cotton to almonds to dairy products. But Central Valley industries also pour forth a darker bounty: a vast array of water contaminants, including nitrates from fertilizer use and mega-dairy waste and pesticide components, such as DBCP - a chemical banned for causing cancer and harming men's reproductive systems that still appears in Central Valley wells. These contaminants mix with water used to irrigate crops and wash cows and then seeps into the Central Valley's groundwater. When people in neighboring communities drink this water, they consume known carcinogens and acute poisons, such as nitrates, which can kill infants in a matter of days.

 

When contaminant levels spike or wells fail, no large water agency stands ready to come fix broken treatment systems. Most of these small communities must shoulder the costs alone, paying for expensive maintenance and operations out of the lean budgets of a couple of hundred farmworker families.

 

These contamination and infrastructure problems have grown unchecked since development in the Central Valley began.

 

Virtually every water agency ignores California's massive groundwater contamination problem. Regulatory agencies such as the state and regional Water Quality Control boards have given a green light to rampant agricultural pollution. California and Texas remain the only states in the country without a groundwater management program.

 

Meanwhile, the state has developed an elaborate and expensive system to pipe crystal-clear Northern California river water to Central Valley farms, at taxpayer expense. The vast webs of canals and aqueducts, subsidized by public dollars, bring water to Central Valley farms. Fresh, clean water flows right by the homes of men and women who harvest the irrigated fields, but have no access to safe drinking water.

 

Without the ability to hire highly paid staffers and lobbyists, farm families find their voices drowned out by the raging debates about California water. They continually fall through the cracks of local, state and regional planning.

 

Instead of talking about future water needs, we need to talk about the chronic lack of access to clean drinking water Central Valley residents face every day. Instead of spending billions of dollars on building new reservoirs, let's talk about protecting one of California's largest existing reservoirs - our groundwater.

 

California water agencies can start by making a serious commitment to groundwater protection and management. The largest sources of groundwater contamination in the Central Valley - agriculture and dairies - are virtually unregulated. Agriculture is allowed to discharge waste water that does not meet Clean Water Act standards, while virtually every other industry must meet these basic water quality standards. This highly toxic water then contaminates the source of drinking water for many small communities.

 

The state could play a lead role in developing innovative solutions and projects to address the problem. Right now, regulatory and water resource agencies acknowledge the level of contamination but have refused to take action.

 

Many organizations have developed projects and proposals that would take important steps to relieving the drinking water crisis, such as requiring groundwater management plans of industries and agencies, setting aside state funds to address the contamination and requiring water districts to work with communities that do not have clean drinking water in their area to develop alternative water sources. Unfortunately, most of these programs fall apart as soon as industry objects and then the state shirks its duty, saying the problem is too big, unwieldy or out of its jurisdiction. Time and again, we have seen agencies, legislators, and policymakers fail to take meaningful action on groundwater protection and management, because it is a tough issue.

 

The governor is right. We do need to invest in California's water infrastructure. The place to start should be obvious for such a golden state: ensuring all communities have safe, clean and affordable drinking water.

 

Laurel Firestone is co-director of the Community Water Center, based in Visalia. Amy Vanderwarker is the outreach coordinator for the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water, based in Oakland. They will be participating in a panel discussion on water and social justice as part of the Commonwealth Club's Cool Clear Water series on Aug. 30th. More information is available at www.commonwealthclub.org/water. #

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/27/EDDMRP3I1.DTL

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