Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
June 9, 2008
4. Water Quality –
Turning
Some officials say recycled water is answer to drought
Contra Costa Times- 6/8/08
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Turning
By Rich Connell, Staff Writer
In a conference room atop a downtown
But when his staff explained that community meetings on the project might not begin until early next year, H. David Nahai quickly grew uneasy.
That's too slow, too risky, the Department of Water and Power general manager told his team.
"Folks on the street who'll hear about wastewater treatment [may] have some reticence about it. . . . The more this languishes, the more the fires of suspicion are going to get fanned.
"We need to go out quicker."
The recent session captured the larger political dynamics of Villaraigosa’s ambitious new effort to wean
With a statewide drought, a broad spectrum of early political support and new purification technologies, administration officials think they are well positioned to begin a years-long transition to wastewater recycling for household use.
But a long shadow is still being cast by the multimillion-dollar collapse of a similar effort eight years ago, when water recycling was dubbed "toilet to tap" and the issue became mired in a mayoral campaign and the
"The public piece is always the key," said Raphael Sonenshein, a political science professor who has written about the city's secession era. "You can say the climate is better. It doesn't mean it's going to be smooth sailing."
Both the scientific and political climates are important, officials acknowledge. At this point at least, each appears more favorable for Villaraigosa than for his most recent two predecessors, both of whom wrestled with wastewater recycling.
One of the biggest differences environmentally is that
There, officials use multistage, state-of-the-art reverse osmosis, microfiltration and ultraviolet light exposure with hydrogen peroxide to take sewage effluent to near-distilled water quality. The water is then pumped to spreading grounds, where it filters through purifying substrata to mix with underground supplies serving 2.3 million residents across the county.
"The quality is extraordinary when you run water through that level of treatment," said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, an environmental group involved in coastal and groundwater quality advocacy.
Nahai said
During the time it will take to get approvals and build treatment facilities, technology is likely to advance so the city can use even more refined purification systems, Nahai said.
Indeed, galloping technology is presenting new solutions as well as new questions about water quality, including recycled water.
Testing has become increasingly sophisticated, finding trace levels of new pollutants and giving rise to concerns about so-called emerging contaminants. They include pharmaceuticals, antibiotics and an array of what are called endocrine disrupters, which have been found to affect development in fish.
For recycling treated wastewater into underground supplies, the state requires information-only monitoring for the emerging pollutants while encouraging the water industry to help develop standardized testing procedures.
Such efforts will help the state Department of Public Health "determine how effective the existing treatment technologies are performing," the agency said in a statement.
Emerging pollutants are the type of issue the DWP needs to address openly with the community, officials say, to avoid a replay of the agency's failed 1990s water recycling project.
After years of planning, state and regional water agency approvals and construction of a $55-million treatment plant, the city abruptly abandoned its wastewater recycling plan for household use after opposition swelled in the Valley, where the process was going to and will take place.
Candidates in the 2001 mayoral contest -- led Joel Wachs, at the time a councilman from the Valley -- distanced themselves from the project and the risk of offending the vote-rich northern suburbs. Outrage over "toilet to tap" fed into the Valley secession movement, which was gaining steam and moving toward a citywide vote just as the plant was coming online.
Today, secession fervor has waned and many Valley council members are Villaraigosa allies. Notably, the first politician quoted in a Villaraigosa news release applauding the administration's multifaceted water plan is Councilwoman Wendy Greuel, who represents Wachs' former district.
Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino and a water recycling critic, has called for a public vote before any treated water goes into groundwater supplies.
And some environmental groups have complained that the mayor's water plan -- which includes crackdowns on wasters, incentives to replace water-guzzling washing machines and new storm-water-capturing reservoirs -- does nothing to limit growth.
Others say incentives should be included to replace lawns with drought-resistant landscaping.
But so far no organized opposition has emerged.
With a state drought, competition for water from other regions and court rulings reducing Northern California supplies, people are realizing that
"We don't have as many options as we did when Joel Wachs raised this," he said, adding that the timing of the proposal, announced last month, may have muted public reaction.
"I think people are really more concerned about other things going on, like gas prices going up and home prices falling," Huffman said.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/politics/cal/la-me-water7-2008jun07,0,855649,full.story
Some officials say recycled water is answer to drought
Contra Costa Times- 6/8/08
By Julia Scott
HALF MOON BAY — In 2002, the first year that the Sewer Authority Mid-Coastside gave serious thought to recycling wastewater into irrigation water on the coast, the winter was wet and Crystal Springs Reservoir, an important storage site for summer drinking water, was high.
But Wednesday's declaration of a statewide drought came as no surprise to
The
In a neat bit of timing, the Sewer Authority Mid-Coastside's board of directors last week commissioned a new study on the feasibility and expense of producing recycled water for use by the large flower nurseries and thirsty golf courses in Half Moon Bay. The new water users would get a drought-proof source of water year-round, and Half Moon Bay would divert far less potable water to farmers, keeping some in surplus for future needs.
If Nurserymen's Exchange, the largest flower grower on the coast, switched to using recycled water, it would free up 15 percent of the city's available water supply from the Hetch Hetchy reservoir, said Dave Dickson, general manager of the Coastside County Water District.
"We're bumping our heads on the ceiling in terms of how much water supply is available to use. There just isn't any place to get more water readily," he said.
The concept makes sense to Sewer Authority board member John Muller, a local farmer who also happens to sit on the Half Moon Bay City Council.
Muller irrigates his pumpkin fields with well water, not water from the Sierras, but he knows the groundwater he draws on will not last forever — and he's had to use more of it than usual for this time of year, just to keep his soil from blowing away. Like many other coastal wells, it's also laced with manganese, which clogs up the pipes and changes the taste of the water.
"Every morning when you get up you pray the water will come out, let me tell you," Muller said. "And pumping costs are high."
In spite of the logic, the Sewer Authority has yet to commit anything beyond the funds to hire a consultant to prepare the latest feasibility study, the fourth such study since 2002. In 2005, the project gained momentum when Half Moon Bay voters overwhelmingly passed an advisory measure approving the use of recycled water to irrigate fields and supplement dangerously low flow levels in local creeks.
Muller says Sewer Authority board members have dragged their feet on a project that could cost more than $14 million in plant upgrades and new pipeline construction, but that the time had come to get serious.
"We talk about it at every meeting and we just need to push forward with it. The whole world is looking at us," Muller said.
Sewer Authority Manager Jack Foley denied that his agency had faced any delays in formulating a recycled water plan. The new consultant will, among other things, seek a commitment from Nurserymen's Exchange, local golf course managers Ocean Colony Partners, and other potential customers who, like them, have expressed strong interest. The Sewer Authority will also need to update its cost estimates and seek out state funding sources.
One pressing question is whether the farmers themselves are willing to band together and form an irrigation district that would cover the cost of laying new pipelines and pumping the water uphill to their properties. The Sewer Authority treats wastewater from the entire Coastside, from Montara to south of Half Moon Bay.
Even with the pipeline costs covered, previous estimates of the upgrades required to convert the plant to a tertiary treatment system — with new steps to remove microscopic bacteria, including the use of ultraviolet rays — range from $5 million to $14.5 million in 2005 dollars.
The latest feasibility study, in February 2007, spelled out two options: the $5.1 million option would produce 1.65 million gallons per day of recycled water in the summer, while the plant continued to discharge the rest into the ocean in the winter as it does now. The second, $14.5 million option would convert the entire wastewater inflow of 3 million gallons per day for reuse, including local stream flow augmentation.
Two of the main concerns with recycled water are controlling salinity and nitrogen levels, especially when it comes to delicate hothouse plants, Foley said. Those water users will need to have full confidence in the water quality before signing on, he said. The price will also need to be right.
"The costs of constructing a recycled water plant have decreased, but the costs of construction have gone up," he said. "I would assume that the price per acre-foot (of water) has gone up as well, with energy costs."
The expense of building water recycling plants may seem small in the future, however, compared with the kinds of engineering projects water managers are contemplating as it becomes increasingly clear that
Recycled water is becoming increasingly common in California, and building more water recycling plants could meet 30 percent of Bay Area residents' growing water needs by 2030, according to the state Recycled Water Task Force.
Meanwhile, more than half the potable water in
Pacific Institute Executive Director Peter Gleick attributes the slow pace to embrace recycled water, in part, to a "psychological barrier" associated with the concept of re-using treated wastewater — despite the fact that many states already get their drinking water from lakes and rivers filled with treated wastewater discharged by other cities upstream.
"I think people are reluctant to move toward using recycled water because high-quality potable water has been too cheap and too easily available for uses that don't require it. It's not really until water is understood to be truly scarce that we'll start to think about recycled water as an asset rather than a liability," Gleick said.
Recycled water has been much more than a concept in
"Rather than just hope for the drought to end, the focus toward lake restoration was kind of a paradigm shift away from the problems. We started looking at solutions," said Patrick Sweetland, director of the Department of Water and Wastewater Resources.
After years of negotiations, the city built a $7.5 million recycling plant in 2004. It provides summertime irrigation for the Olympic Club, the Lake Merced Golf and Country Club, and the San Francisco Golf and Country Club, as well as landscape medians on
The city is now designing a pipeline extension for a new reservoir station at Harding Park Golf Course, according to Sweetland. The water recycling plant treats 2.8 million gallons per day of the 7.1 million gallons it receives; the rest is treated to a lesser level and flows to the ocean. The golf courses pay roughly 15 cents more for 100 cubic feet of water (748 gallons) than they do to pump groundwater in the winter, because of the higher cost of operating the plant, Sweetland said. They consider it worth the expense.
"We're doing it to preserve our groundwater aquifer. You've got a resource called wastewater going out to the ocean. Can you capture it and put it to a better use? And what are the public benefits in doing that? Expanding the water supply is a public benefit," he said.#
http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_9522941
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