On Jan. 26, 2010, the San Diego City Council directed the Mayor to execute an agreement between the City of San Diego and RMC Water and Environment, to perform the project management and public outreach for the Indirect Potable Reuse Reservoir Augmentation Project, recently renamed the Water Purification Demonstration Project.
As long as we’re still waiting for official outreach on the subject, here are some things that could probably use some early discussion. First a brief history.
Faced with the fact that 90% of San Diego County’s demand for water must be satisfied by importing it from hundreds of miles away in the Colorado River and Northern California, the San Diego County Water Authority (SDCWA) looked for ways to reduce its dependence on outside sources. The region was facing possible cutbacks in water allocations from the Colorado River, supplies from Northern California were at risk not only from periodic droughts but from complicated state-wide legal, political, and environmental constraints — not to mention a vast costly infrastructure that required constant maintenance and was vulnerable to damage from earthquakes or other disasters — and there was a growing population driving new development which required more water.
Among the possibilities SDCWA looked at were seawater desalination, potential new groundwater resources, water conservation, water transfers from other agencies, water recycling, and water reuse.
To address one of these fronts, SDCWA decided on a project that would perform a feasibility study for a water purification project that would take tertiary-treated water from the City of San Diego’s North City Water Reclamation Plant, and purify it with advanced techniques (micro filtration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet radiation, and peroxide conditioning).
Tests had shown that the resulting purified water exceeded federal and state drinking water standards. In other words, it was higher in quality than the raw water we import.
The plan was to use the purified water to augment the raw imported water supply at San Vicente Reservoir. The water would remain in detention for at least six months per regulation, and then as with all raw imported water, it would go the normal route to a potable water treatment plant and be delivered to customers.
It seemed like a great project: it would reduce the amount of water we needed to purchase elsewhere, it would supply us with high quality drinking water, it was was more reliable because it wasn’t subject to disruptions in water supply lines delivering imported water, and it was virtually drought-proof.
Is this the Water Purification Demonstration Project mentioned above? Not exactly. It describes a project from 1993.
What ever happened to that project?