Water containing wastes – aka wastewater – from residential,
commercial and industrial processes requires treatment to remove
pollutants prior to discharge. After treatment, the water is
suitable for nonconsumption (nonpotable) and even potable use.
In California, water recycling is a critical component of the
state’s efforts to use water supplies more efficiently. The state
presently recycling about 669,000 acre-feet of water per year and
has the potential to reuse an additional two million acre-feet
per year.
Non-potable uses include:
landscape and crop irrigation
stream and wetlands enhancement
industrial processes
recreational lakes, fountains and decorative ponds
toilet flushing and gray water applications
as a barrier to protect groundwater supplies
from seawater intrusion
wetland habitat creation, restoration, and maintenance
UN and partner water experts say it is time to increase the
tapping of Earth’s diverse and abundant unconventional water
sources – the millions of cubic kilometres of water in deep
land-based and seabed aquifers, in fog and icebergs, in the
ballast holds of thousands of ships, and elsewhere. A
new book, Unconventional Water Resources … says
these potential supplies can help many of the 1 in 4 people on
Earth who face shortages of water for drinking, sanitation,
agriculture and economic development.
Navajo Nation leaders say failing septic and solid waste
systems are becoming an increasing concern in many areas of the
reservation. One tribal lawmaker has gathered nearly 170
accounts from residents of Blue Gap, Many Farms and other
chapters about deficient sanitation facilities in homes.
Officials say it’s a serious environmental contamination issue
that threatens land and water and creates significant health
risks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board
announced the appointment of Eileen White as its executive
officer, succeeding Michael Montgomery. Her first day is July
11. White most recently served as director of East Bay
Municipal Utility District’s Wastewater Department, where she
recently led the development of EBMUD’s Integrated Master Plan
for its main wastewater treatment plant, along with EBMUD’s
Climate Action Plan, to guide operations, investments and
priorities for decades to come. White managed a workforce of
280 people.
Homes and businesses across central Sonoma County generated
more than 5 billion gallons of wastewater last year, enough to
fill more than 7,500 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That sewage
flowed into Santa Rosa’s regional treatment plant south of
Sebastopol, where it was cleaned up and nearly all of it put to
a second use. About 4 billion gallons of recycled water was
pumped north from the Llano Road treatment plant in a 41-mile
pipeline and up a steep slope into The Geysers geothermal
fields southeast of Cloverdale.
San Diego’s top brass offered on Thursday to pony up more than
$33 million to resolve a hotly disputed pipeline deal between
the city and East County concerning two large water recycling
projects. The move comes as the parties inch closer to what
could become a protracted legal battle, with serious
implications for the East County Advanced Water Purification
Project and the city’s massive $5 billion Pure Water sewage
recycling venture.
Petaluma, one of the driest corners of Sonoma County during the
past two years of drought, is making a multimillion-dollar
advance into recycled water. Operator of a wastewater
treatment plant that serves about 65,000 people and treats
about 5 million gallons of effluent a day, Petaluma is seeking
grants for four projects with a total cost of $42
million. Six other North Bay agencies — including Sonoma
Water and the Sonoma Valley County Sanitation District — are
proposing a dozen projects totaling $41.2 million, bringing the
total to $83.2 million, as Gov. Gavin Newsom is backing water
reuse as an antidote to drought.
A dash of ruthenium atoms on a mesh of copper nanowires could
be one step toward a revolution in the global ammonia industry
that also helps the environment. Collaborators at Rice
University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering, Arizona
State University and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
developed the high-performance catalyst that can, with near
100% efficiency, pull ammonia and solid ammonia — aka
fertilizer — from low levels of nitrates that are widespread
in industrial wastewater and polluted groundwater.
Five months after 8.5 million gallons of raw sewage spilled
from a ruptured mainline in Carson, an independent engineer’s
report has pinpointed its cause and offered practical advice
for the county agency responsible. … The rupture was
primarily caused, the report said, by corrosion of both a
48-inch diameter, 1960s-era concrete pipe and a sewer cover at
the intersection of 212th Street and South Lynton Avenue.
… Another contributing factor in the failure, the report
said, was a rain event on Dec. 30.
Mayor Todd Gloria Thursday highlighted infrastructure funding
in his proposed $4.89 billion budget for the city’s 2023 fiscal
year, including major investments in water, sewer and
stormwater infrastructure…. A total of $349 million of the
$808.9 million capital improvements program is earmarked for
Phase 1 of Pure Water — the water recycling program touted by
the city as being able to supply nearly half of San Diego’s
drinking water by 2035 while cutting in half the amount of
treated sewage discharged into the ocean.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced a $441
million Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (WIFIA)
loan to the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts (Sanitation
Districts) to support the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant
Effluent Outfall Tunnel Project (“Clearwater Project”). With
this WIFIA loan, EPA is helping modernize infrastructure while
creating local jobs in Los Angeles County.
A handful of state lawmakers gathered last week on the side of
the Tijuana River Estuary that’s not visibly clogged by
plastics and tires spilling from Mexico down canyon gullies or
down the river itself to ask the governor for money to, well,
stop trash from spilling over the border. Southern
California lawmakers hope Gov. Gavin Newsom will put $100
million in next year’s budget to be split equally between the
Tijuana River and the Mexicali-to-Salton-Sea-flowing New River,
both sewage-plagued water bodies.
Aging subterranean infrastructure in Sacramento will get a
boost from $3.5 million in federal funding that will pay for
future underground reservoirs to harden parts of the combined
storm and sewage system within the city’s core. The funding was
celebrated Friday during a news conference in Land Park to
outline the project with Rep. Doris Matsui, D-Sacramento, and
city leaders including County Supervisor Patrick Kennedy and
City Councilman Rick Jennings.
Neighborhoods across northern San Diego will be disrupted by
tunneling and pipeline construction this summer when work kicks
into high gear on Pure Water, the largest infrastructure
project in city history. With contracts totaling more than $1
billion recently awarded for eight of the 10 major projects
that make up Pure Water’s first phase, city officials say
nearly the entire project will be under construction starting
in late summer or early fall. Meanwhile, city officials are
preparing to make key decisions soon on the second phase of
Pure Water, which is slated for construction in the 2030s.
Momentum is building for a unique
interstate deal that aims to transform wastewater from Southern
California homes and business into relief for the stressed
Colorado River. The collaborative effort to add resiliency to a
river suffering from overuse, drought and climate change is being
shaped across state lines by some of the West’s largest water
agencies.
Residents in the Cañón de la Pedrera neighborhood of Tijuana
about six miles south of the border are complaining about a
putrid odor that is so strong some days it has made a few
neighbors feel ill. … The smell has lasted for weeks and
seems to be coming from a nearby concrete channel where some
residents appear to have built their own makeshift drainage
system to dump their waste water into. … That water
flows down the river and eventually ends up in the Pacific
Ocean.
Today, the Responsible Flushing Alliance (RFA) published a new
infographic highlighting some of the strangest objects that
have been pulled out of municipal wastewater treatment catch
basins in three California areas. … Consumers are urged
to look for the “Do Not Flush” symbol on the packaging of wipes
that are not intended by the manufacturer to be flushable. This
includes baby wipes, household cleaning wipes, makeup removal
wipes, and other wipes made with plastic materials that do not
disperse in water.
California is home to thousands of oil and gas wells abandoned
years ago and never properly sealed — many of them
sitting near homes, schools and businesses from the coast to
the Inland Empire. With no legally responsible party to clean
them up, environmental leaders say that 5,356 abandoned and
deserted wells now sprawl across Southern California and the
state, polluting drinking water and leaking methane, a powerful
greenhouse gas. That is about to change as the state gets
millions of dollars in state and federal funding to safely seal
old wells.
It is with great sadness that the West County Wastewater (WCW)
Board of Directors announce the sudden passing of Board Member,
Sherry Stanley. Director Stanley was first elected to the WCW
Board of Directors in 2016. In 2019 she sat as Vice President
of the Board. After WCW moved to a district-based election
system in 2020, Director Stanley was elected to District 2,
which serves North Richmond and areas of San Pablo.
Solvang will invest another $10 million into its wastewater
treatment plant, including tooling that could support future
wastewater recycling, after the council voted unanimously
Monday to support the least expensive of four potential
options. … During its goal planning sessions, the council
directed staff to explore the feasibility of producing and
delivering recycled water.
You could say that Orange Memorial Park in South San Francisco
is about to turn deep green. … [Colma Creek is] an
historic, natural waterway that was heavily cemented for flood
control in the early days of the area’s development. For
decades, the creek has carried runoff from the surrounding
watershed straight into San Francisco Bay, along with a
significant amount of trash. But that’s about to change.
California prohibits farmers from growing crops with
chemical-laced wastewater from fracking. Yet the state still
allows them to use water produced by conventional oil
drilling—a chemical soup that contains many of the same toxic
compounds. When rumors spread several years ago that California
was growing some of the nation’s nuts, citrus and vegetables
with wastewater produced from hydraulic fracturing, known as
fracking, regulators said that would be illegal.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the San Diego
River has long been listed as an impaired water body, but SDSU
researchers are working to fix it. … In another study,
SDSU environmental engineer Natalie Mladenov and her
team found that high levels of bacteria correlate with the
presence of caffeine and sucralose, found only in human
waste.
In 2004, Emeryville, an industrial suburb of San Francisco,
sent an environmental remediation crew to inject 15,000 gallons
of cottage cheese into groundwater below an abandoned factory.
The factory manufactured car bumpers from 1951 to 1967, and the
hexavalent chromium it left behind had since traveled into the
groundwater. Hexavalent chromium gives humans cancer, trivalent
chromium doesn’t, and cottage cheese converts the former to the
latter.
The State Water Resources Control Board (State Water Board)
recently updated the regulated community and the public on the
Board’s statewide investigation to study and sample potential
sources of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
The State Water Board’s investigation is aimed at public
agencies involved in drinking water and wastewater treatment,
as well as private entities involved in manufacturing or other
industries where PFAS may have been used in various products
and/or processes.
Martha Guzman recalls those awful
days working on water and other issues as a deputy legislative
secretary for then-Gov. Jerry Brown. California was mired in a
recession and the state’s finances were deep in the red. Parks
were cut, schools were cut, programs were cut to try to balance a
troubled state budget in what she remembers as “that terrible
time.”
She now finds herself in a strikingly different position: As
administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s
Region 9, she has a mandate to address water challenges across
California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii and $1 billion to help pay
for it. It is the kind of funding, she said, that is usually
spread out over a decade. Guzman called it the “absolutely
greatest opportunity.”
Innovative efforts to accelerate
restoration of headwater forests and to improve a river for the
benefit of both farmers and fish. Hard-earned lessons for water
agencies from a string of devastating California wildfires.
Efforts to drought-proof a chronically water-short region of
California. And a broad debate surrounding how best to address
persistent challenges facing the Colorado River.
These were among the issues Western Water explored in
2019, and are still worth taking a look at in case you missed
them.
The southern part of California’s Central Coast from San Luis Obispo County to Ventura County, home to about 1.5 million people, is blessed with a pleasing Mediterranean climate and a picturesque terrain. Yet while its unique geography abounds in beauty, the area perpetually struggles with drought.
Indeed, while the rest of California breathed a sigh of relief with the return of wet weather after the severe drought of 2012–2016, places such as Santa Barbara still grappled with dry conditions.
Blasted by sun and beaten by waves,
plastic bottles and bags shed fibers and tiny flecks of
microplastic debris that litter the San Francisco Bay where they
can choke the marine life that inadvertently consumes it.
Summer is a good time to take a
break, relax and enjoy some of the great beaches, waterways and
watersheds around California and the West. We hope you’re getting
a chance to do plenty of that this July.
But in the weekly sprint through work, it’s easy to miss
some interesting nuggets you might want to read. So while we’re
taking a publishing break to work on other water articles planned
for later this year, we want to help you catch up on
Western Water stories from the first half of this year
that you might have missed.
Each day, people living on the streets and camping along waterways across California face the same struggle – finding clean drinking water and a place to wash and go to the bathroom.
Some find friendly businesses willing to help, or public restrooms and drinking water fountains. Yet for many homeless people, accessing the water and sanitation that most people take for granted remains a daily struggle.
Californians have been doing an
exceptional job
reducing their indoor water use, helping the state survive
the most recent drought when water districts were required to
meet conservation targets. With more droughts inevitable,
Californians are likely to face even greater calls to save water
in the future.
For the bulk of her career, Jayne
Harkins has devoted her energy to issues associated with the
management of the Colorado River, both with the U.S. Bureau of
Reclamation and with the Colorado River Commission of Nevada.
Now her career is taking a different direction. Harkins, 58, was
appointed by President Trump last August to take the helm of the
United States section of the U.S.-Mexico agency that oversees
myriad water matters between the two countries as they seek to
sustainably manage the supply and water quality of the Colorado
River, including its once-thriving Delta in Mexico, and other
rivers the two countries share. She is the first woman to be
named the U.S. Commissioner of the International Boundary and
Water Commission for either the United States or Mexico in the
commission’s 129-year history.
Although Santa Monica may be the most aggressive Southern California water provider to wean itself from imported supplies, it is hardly the only one looking to remake its water portfolio.
In Los Angeles, a city of about 4 million people, efforts are underway to dramatically slash purchases of imported water while boosting the amount from recycling, stormwater capture, groundwater cleanup and conservation. Mayor Eric Garcetti in 2014 announced a plan to reduce the city’s purchase of imported water from Metropolitan Water District by one-half by 2025 and to provide one-half of the city’s supply from local sources by 2035. (The city considers its Eastern Sierra supplies as imported water.)
Imported water from the Sierra
Nevada and the Colorado River built Southern California. Yet as
drought, climate change and environmental concerns render those
supplies increasingly at risk, the Southland’s cities have ramped
up their efforts to rely more on local sources and less on
imported water.
Far and away the most ambitious goal has been set by the city of
Santa Monica, which in 2014 embarked on a course to be virtually
water independent through local sources by 2023. In the 1990s,
Santa Monica was completely dependent on imported water. Now, it
derives more than 70 percent of its water locally.
In rural areas with widely dispersed houses, reliance upon a
centralized
sewer system is not practical compared to individual
wastewater treatment methods. These on-site management facilities
– or septic systems – are more commonplace given their simpler
structure, efficiency and easy maintenance.
Microplastics – plastic debris
measuring less than 5 millimeters – are an
increasing water quality concern. Entering the water as
industrial microbeads or as larger plastic litter that degrade
into small pellets, microplastics come from a variety of
consumer products.
Directly detecting harmful pathogens in water can be expensive,
unreliable and incredibly complicated. Fortunately, certain
organisms are known to consistently coexist with these harmful
microbes which are substantially easier to detect and culture:
coliform bacteria. These generally non-toxic organisms are
frequently used as “indicator
species,” or organisms whose presence demonstrates a
particular feature of its surrounding environment.
The biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) of water determines the
impact of decaying matter on species in a specific ecosystem.
Sampling for BOD tests how much oxygen is needed by bacteria to
break down the organic matter.
Point sources release pollutants from discrete conveyances, such
as a discharge pipe, and are regulated by federal and state
agencies. The main point source dischargers are factories and
sewage treatment plants, which release treated
wastewater.
This 30-minute documentary-style DVD on the history and current
state of the San Joaquin River Restoration Program includes an
overview of the geography and history of the river, historical
and current water delivery and uses, the genesis and timeline of
the 1988 lawsuit, how the settlement was reached and what was
agreed to.
This 25-minute documentary-style DVD, developed in partnership
with the California Department of Water Resources, provides an
excellent overview of climate change and how it is already
affecting California. The DVD also explains what scientists
anticipate in the future related to sea level rise and
precipitation/runoff changes and explores the efforts that are
underway to plan and adapt to climate.
Many Californians don’t realize that when they turn on the
faucet, the water that flows out could come from a source close
to home or one hundreds of miles away. Most people take their
water for granted; not thinking about the elaborate systems and
testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state. Where drinking water comes from,
how it’s treated, and what people can do to protect its quality
are highlighted in this 2007 PBS documentary narrated by actress
Wendie Malick.
A 30-minute version of the 2007 PBS documentary Drinking Water:
Quenching the Public Thirst. This DVD is ideal for showing at
community forums and speaking engagements to help the public
understand the complex issues surrounding the elaborate systems
and testing that go into delivering clean, plentiful water to
households throughout the state.
As the state’s population continues to grow and traditional water
supplies grow tighter, there is increased interest in reusing
treated wastewater for a variety of activities, including
irrigation of crops, parks and golf courses, groundwater recharge
and industrial uses.
The 28-page Layperson’s Guide to California
Wastewater is an in-depth, easy-to-understand publication
that provides background information on the history of wastewater
treatment and how wastewater is collected, conveyed, treated and
disposed of today. The guide also offers case studies of
different treatment plants and their treatment processes.
The 24-page Layperson’s Guide to the Delta explores the competing
uses and demands on California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Included in the guide are sections on the history of the Delta,
its role in the state’s water system, and its many complex issues
with sections on water quality, levees, salinity and agricultural
drainage, fish and wildlife, and water distribution.
Wastewater management in California centers on the collection,
conveyance,
treatment, reuse and disposal of wastewater. This process is
conducted largely by public agencies, though there are also
private systems in places where a publicly owned treatment plant
is not feasible.
In California, wastewater treatment takes place through 100,000
miles of sanitary sewer lines and at more than 900 wastewater
treatment plants that manage the roughly 4 billion gallons of
wastewater generated in the state each day.
