Department of Water Resources
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
August 11, 2008
4. Water Quality –
Bill would allow agencies to ban water softeners if salt threatens recycling efforts
The Sacramento
Fix Agreed for Landfill Fouling California
Environmental News Service- 8/8/08
EXPENSIVE UPGRADES FOR MEN’S COLONY, SLO: Using creeks for sewers is costly, Strict water-quality regulations for those using creeks for disposal are aimed at protecting the habitat of native fish
SanLuisObispo.com- 8/9/08
A Tall, Cool Drink of ... Sewage?
The New York Times- 8/8/08
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Bill would allow agencies to ban water softeners if salt threatens recycling efforts
The Sacramento
By Daniel Zarchy
The Culligan Man could soon join the Maytag repairman in
Assembly Bill 2270, by Assemblymen John Laird and Mike Feuer, D-
Bill supporters say the volume of salt dumped into the sewer by water softeners – as much as a pound per day per softener – compromises efforts to recycle water.
Water softeners are currently unregulated, so it is hard to know how many softeners exist in the state, but their trade association estimates at least 800,000 softeners are sold nationally each year, more than 15 percent of them in
Current law allows local agencies to prevent the installation of softeners but not to order mandatory removal of existing devices.
Laird, a Santa Cruz Democrat, described the bill as a way to "level the playing field" by holding residences to the same standard as agriculture and industry for salinity in water.
Supporters believe the state's groundwater reserves are at risk because recycled water from residences is often used for agriculture, which allows the salt to seep underground.
"It's not time to protect somebody that's polluting groundwater at a time that we have to rely increasingly more on groundwater as part of a comprehensive solution," Laird said.
Water softeners replace calcium and magnesium – minerals that make water "hard" – with sodium. Alternatives exist, such as using potassium, but they are not as common and are often more expensive. The law would not apply to devices that don't emit salt.
Hard water decreases soap's effectiveness and leaves sediment in pipes and appliances. It does not pose a health risk.
The bill has support from several city governments and water agencies throughout the state, including
But the measure faces opposition from water softening companies.
Peter Censky, executive director of the Water Quality Association, which represents water softener manufacturers on this issue, said that the bill had been rushed through the Legislature and would be an unwelcome surprise for many consumers.
"Once a community does something like (a ban on softeners) … they're going to end up with a lot of consumers who rely on water softening to protect their property who are going to be caught completely by surprise," Censky said.
The city of
"You can either pay a lot of money for new improvements, very expensive treatment plant improvements, or you can try to do something at the source," said Royce Cunningham, a city engineer for
The bill would require agencies to compensate residents for their softeners if they had to be removed. The bill cleared the Assembly and is pending in the Senate.#
http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/1146604.html
Fix Agreed for Landfill Fouling California
Environmental News Service- 8/8/08
Republic Services of Southern Nevada is the current operator of the Sunrise Mountain Landfill, an unlined 440-acre closed municipal solid waste landfill located three miles outside the
It contains over 49 million cubic yards of municipal solid waste, medical waste, sewage sludge, asbestos, construction waste and soil contaminated with petroleum hydrocarbons.
The landfill cover failed during a series of storms in September 1998, sending waste into the
In a consent decree, filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in
"Today's settlement will minimize the risk to
"This settlement reflects the federal government's commitment to protecting valuable natural resources like
The remedy, which is expected to take roughly two years to build, will be designed to withstand a 200 year storm and is expected to cost over $36 million.
Upon completion, the remedy is estimated to prevent the release of over 14 million pounds of contaminants annually, including stormwater pollutants, methane gas and landfill leachate.
The landfill was operated on behalf of
Following the landfill cover failure in 1998, the EPA ordered Republic Dumpco, a company related to Republic Services of Southern Nevada, and the Clark County Public Works Department to correct violations of the federal clean water laws and to immediately stabilize the site.
"Landfill operators must ensure that effective safeguards are in place to protect the environment and nearby communities," Wayne Nastri, administrator of the EPA's Pacific Southwest region said Thursday from his office in
The proposed consent decree, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada, is subject to a 30-day public comment period and approval by the federal court.#
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/aug2008/2008-08-08-095.asp
EXPENSIVE UPGRADES FOR MEN’S COLONY, SLO: Using creeks for sewers is costly, Strict water-quality regulations for those using creeks for disposal are aimed at protecting the habitat of native fish
SanLuisObispo.com- 8/9/08
By David Sneed
Bob Barlogio, chief plant operator, looks at the discharge pipe from the California Men’s Colony sewage treatment plant near
The California Men’s Colony prison and the city of
They discharge their wastewater into coastal streams, a fact that adds millions of dollars to the state and city ratepayers.
Ef fluent from sewers that discharge into creeks must be treated using standards that are very near those required for drinking water.
And the standards for some pollutants to which fish are particularly sensitive are many times more stringent than those for drinking water.
“State toxics rules have a whole laundry list of stringent limits for plants that discharge to inland surface waters,” said Roger Briggs, executive officer of the Central Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board. “That makes it substantially more expensive to treat and monitor.” Most other sewer plants in the region discharge into the ocean or to evaporation and percolation ponds.
In an effort to shave $10 million to $12 million off that price tag, the city has petitioned the regional water board to remove the creek’s designation as a drinking water source, said David Hix, city wastewater manager.
That request is still pending and
will likely be decided early next year, Briggs said.
California Men’s Colony recently finished a $25 million upgrade of its sewage treatment plant and is planning to spend $5 million to $10 million more to meet new federal Environmental Protection Agency discharge standards.
The prison’s sewer system discharges to Chorro Creek, which flows into
The prison’s old plant had a history of spills.
But its new plant is having trouble meeting the stringent discharge standards, and prison officials have agreed to pay $135,000 for a recent series of violations.
Specifically, the plant is failing to meet disinfectant standards.
It is either not disinfecting adequately and discharging too much bacteria or is disinfecting too much and discharging chlorine, said John Kellerman, the prison’s sewage plant supervisor.
“It’s taken us longer to make adjustments to the waste stream,” he said. “We are definitely on the right track; our violation trend is way down.”
One reason these two plants must meet such strict standards is because San Luis Obispo and Chorro creeks are home to steelhead trout, a species federally listed as threatened.
The state Department of Fish and Game requires that both sewer plants discharge continuously into the creeks in order to maximize habitat for the fish.
Fish and other aquatic life are especially sensitive to some pollutants, and creek-discharging plants must reduce these pollutants to very low levels.
For example, the standards for a pollutant called trihalomethanes are 100 times stricter than drinking water, Kellerman said. Trihalomethanes are a byproduct of the disinfection process.
It is difficult to quantify exactly how much more it costs to treat wastewater to such high standards.
Kellerman estimates that creek discharge standards added $2 million to the price of the new sewer and costs an additional $500,000 a year in staffing expenses.
In addition to the prison, the new treatment plant serves
The upgrade was completed last year, but the plant had another spill in January when an emergency generator failed during a power outage. #
http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/434334.html
A Tall, Cool Drink of ... Sewage?
The New York Times- 8/8/08
By ELIZABETH ROYTE
Before I left
Afterward, I emptied the bucket of dirty water into the toilet and watched as the foamy mess swirled away. This was one of life’s more mundane moments, to be sure. But with water infrastructure on my mind, I took an extra moment to contemplate my water’s journey through city pipes to the wastewater-treatment plant, which separates solids and dumps the disinfected liquids into the ocean.
A day after mopping, I gazed balefully at my hotel toilet in
Opened in January, the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment System is the largest of its type in the world. It cost $480 million to build, will cost $29 million a year to run and took more than a decade to get off the ground. The stumbling block was psychological, not architectural. An aversion to feces is nearly universal, and as critics of the process are keen to point out, getting sewage out of drinking water was one of the most important public health advances of the last 150 years.
Still,
With the demand for water growing, some aquifers dropping faster than they’re replenished, snowpacks thinning and climate change predicted to make dry places even drier, water managers around the country, and the world, are contemplating similar schemes.
While
When I visited the plant, a sprawl of modern buildings behind a concrete wall, in March, Wildermuth, in a blue sport coat and bright tie, acted as my guide. “Quick!” he shouted at one point, mounting a ledge and clinging to the rail over a microfiltration bay. “Over here!” I clambered up just as its contents finished draining from the scum-crusted tank. The sudsy water, direct from the sewage-treatment plant, was the color of Guinness. “This is the most exciting thing you’ll see here, and I didn’t want you to miss it,” he said.
Wildermuth went on to explain what we were looking at: inside each of 16 concrete bays hangs a rack of vertical tubes stuffed with 15,000 polypropylene fibers the thickness of dental floss. The fibers are stippled with holes 1/300th the size of a human hair. Pumps pull water into the fibers, leaving behind anything larger than 0.2 microns, stuff like bacteria, protozoa and the dread “suspended solids.”
The excitement and the bubbles were backwash: every 21 minutes, air is injected into the microfibers to blast them clean.
The schmutz goes back to the sewage-treatment plant, and the cleaner water, now the color of chamomile tea, is pumped toward reverse-osmosis filters in another building. Before we saw that process, Wildermuth led me underground to inspect several enormous pumps and pipes large enough to crawl through. I noted that everything was clearly labeled and scrupulously clean. Then it dawned on me: reassurance was the reason we’d taken the detour.
We followed the pipes up to a sunlit, metal-clad building where the water, now dosed with an antiscalant and sulfuric acid to lower its pH, was forced at high pressure through hundreds of white tubes filled with tightly spiraled sheets of plastic membranes. Reverse osmosis, Wildermuth says, stops cold almost all nonwater molecules (things like salts, viruses and pharmaceuticals). The stuff that’s removed is washed back to a pipe that discharges into the ocean. The filtered water, now known as permeate, moves one building over, where it’s spiked with hydrogen peroxide, a disinfectant, and then circulated past 144 lamps emitting ultraviolet light. “Destruction of compounds through photolysis,” Wildermuth said, nodding.
Anything that’s alive in this water can no longer reproduce.
Strolling back through the campus, Wildermuth took me to a three-part demonstration sink with faucets streaming. The basin on the right contained reverse-osmosis backwash: it was molasses black, topped with a rainbow slick of oil. “Don’t touch,” Wildermuth warned as I leaned in for a better look at the ocean-bound rejectamenta. The middle basin contained the chamomile water from microfiltration. And on the left was the stuff
But even this suctioned, sieved and irradiated water wasn’t quite set for sipping; it still needed to be decarbonized and dosed with lime, to raise its pH. Finally it would enter a massive purple pipe, which dives into the ground inside a nearby pump house and reappears 13 miles to the north, in
The reservoir is a prosaic ending for a substance that’s been through the glitziest of technological wringers, transformed from sewage to drinking water only to be humbly redeposited into the earth. This final filtering step isn’t necessary, strictly speaking, but our psyches seem to demand it.
To understand the basics of contemporary water infrastructure is to acknowledge that most American tap water has had some contact with treated sewage. Our wastewater-treatment plants discharge into streams that feed rivers from which other cities suck water for drinking. By the time
So confident are engineers of so-called advanced treatment technologies that several communities have been discharging highly treated wastewater directly into reservoirs for years.
Environmentalists, river advocates and
As we deplete the earth’s nonrenewable resources, like oil and metals, the one-way trip from raw material to disposed and forgotten waste makes less and less sense. Already we recycle aluminum to avoid mining, compost organic material to avoid generating methane in landfills and turn plastic into lumber. As it becomes more valuable, water will be no different.
“We have to treat all waste as a resource,” Conner Everts, executive director of the Southern California Watershed Alliance, says. “Our water source, hundreds of miles away, is drying up. If the population is growing, what are our options?”
Water conservation could take us a long way, as would lower water subsidies for farmers. But sooner or later, stressed-out utility managers come back to the same idea: returning wastewater to the tap.
The process isn’t risk-free. Some scientists are concerned that dangerous compounds or undetectable viruses will escape the multiple physical and chemical filters at the plant. And others suggest that the potential for human error or mechanical failure — clogged filters or torn membranes that let pathogens through, for example — is too great to risk something as basic to public health as drinking water.
Recycled water should be used only as nondrinking water, says Philip Singer, the Daniel Okun Distinguished Professor of Environmental Engineering at the University of North Carolina. “It may contain trace amounts of contaminants. Reverse osmosis and UV disinfection are very good, but there are still uncertainties.”
And then there are those whose first, and final, reaction is “yuck.”
“Why the hell do we have to drink our own sewage?” asks Muriel Watson, a retired schoolteacher who sat on a
The
To capture and clean that water, the Orange County Water District has gone into hyper-beaver mode on the river. Twenty miles upstream from
It’s one of the many pardoxes of indirect potable reuse that the water leaving the plant in
If everything in the
In other words, nature messes up the expensively reclaimed water. So why stick it back into the ground? “We do it for psychological reasons,” says Adam Hutchinson, director of recharge operations for the water district. “In the future, people will laugh at us for putting it back in, instead of just drinking it.”
Psychologists and marketers have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what makes a product, or a process, seem natural.
Obviously, framing the issue properly is the key to acceptance. “If people connect the history of their water to contamination, you’ll get a disgust response no matter how you treat that water in between,” says Brent Haddad, an associate professor of environmental studies at the
All water on earth is recycled: the same drops that misted Devonian ferns and dripped from the fur of woolly mammoths are watering us today. From evaporation to condensation and precipitation, the cycle goes on and on. But in the planet’s drier regions, where the population continues to rise, we can expect the time between use and reuse to grow ever shorter, with purification, pipes and pumps standing in for natural processes. Instead of sand and gravel filtering our drinking water, microfibers and membranes will do the job; instead of sunlight knocking out parasites, we’ll plug in the UV lamps.
You could argue that in coming to terms with wastewater as a resource, we’ll take better care of our water. At long last, the “everything is connected” message, the bedrock of the environmental movement, will hit home. In this view, once a community is forced to process and drink its toilet water, those who must drink it will rise up and change their ways. Floor moppers will switch to biodegradable cleaning products. Industry will use nontoxic material. Factory farms will cut their use of antibiotics. Maybe we’ll even stop building homes in the desert.
But these situations are not very likely. No one wants to think too hard about where our water comes from. It’s more likely that the virtuosity of water technology will let polluters off the hook: why bother to reduce noxious discharges if the treatment plant can remove just about anything? The technology, far from making us aware of the consequences of our behavior, may give us license to continue doing what we’ve always done.
The recycled water coming out of the sink at the
Then I reminded myself: no naturally occurring water on earth is absolutely pure. And most everything that’s in
It was hot, my throat was parched, and I asked for a refill.#
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/magazine/10wastewater-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
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