Los Angeles will soon begin construction on a $740 million project to convert wastewater into purified drinking water in the San Fernando Valley, expanding the city’s local water supply in an effort to prepare for increasingly severe droughts due to climate change.
The city plans to break ground next month to begin construction of a new facility at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys. When completed, the facility will treat treated wastewater and produce 20 million gallons of drinking water per day, enough to supply about 250,000 people.
Drinking water produced by the plant will be piped 10 miles northeast to LA County’s Hansen Spreading Grounds, where it will flow into the basin and percolate into the groundwater aquifer for storage. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power will later pump water from the well, and after additional testing and treatment, the water will enter pipes and be sent to faucets.
“This is a major step forward for the city,” said Jesus Gonzalez, DWP’s water resources manager. Through this project, he said, the city will start using recycled water as “a new source of sustainable and drought-resistant drinking water.”
Aerial view of the Donald C. Tillman Los Angeles Water Reclamation Plant.
(LA Sanitation and Environment)
LA has recycled wastewater for decades but previously used treated water for outdoor irrigation in areas such as golf courses and parks. With the new facility, scheduled for completion in 2027, the city will be the first to use purified recycled water as part of its drinking water supply.
The initiative, called LA Groundwater Recharge Projectapproved last month by the city’s Board of Water and Power Commissioners. LA Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials have called the key piece that efforts to invest in local water supplies and reduce reliance on large imported supplies less reliable with climate change.
This project has been thirty years in the making. The city built part of the infrastructure, including pipelines and pumping stations, in the 1990s, but those efforts failed in 2000 when debate erupted over opponents and newspaper headlines. called the “toilet-to-tap” project.. The issue caught up in the mayoral campaign and a 2001 ballot measure asking the Valley to secede from the city. The plan then set asidedelayed for many years.
In the meantime, Orange County moved ahead to develop its own Groundwater Filling Systemthe world’s largest project of its kind, which currently recycles 130 million gallons of water per day. The system cleans the wastewater using a three-step advanced treatment process, and the water is then absorbed and injected into the groundwater basin, and becomes part of the source.
“We’re going to build the same treatment system that Orange County has been using for 15 years with great success,” Gonzalez said.
An extensive treatment and purification process, in addition to testing, will ensure that the drinking water will be “very safe once it’s pumped out and served to our customers,” he said.
Digital rendering of the proposed Advanced Water Purification Facility at the Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys.
(LA Sanitation and Environment)
The Tillman plant is one of four wastewater treatment facilities operated by LA Sanitation and Environment.
Currently, treated effluent from the plant is discharged into the Los Angeles River in the Sepulveda Basin, providing a significant portion of the area’s river flow during dry periods. The water recycling project is designed so that even if the cleaned water is piped away, the wastewater stream is assumed to still flow to sustain the LA River and its wildlife habitat, Gonzalez said.
To help cover the cost of new construction, the city received more than $400 million from state and federal governments and the Southern California Metropolitan Water District.
The project has been a long time coming, said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
“This is recycled water that should have been in the city system 20 years ago, but water politics stopped it,” Emas said. “It’s great that it’s finally happening and it’s going to be over quickly.”
City leaders are investing in the facility while also planning a larger effort to turn sewage into purified drinking water. Through the so-called project Pure Water Los Angelesthey plan to treat recycled water from the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant, the largest wastewater treatment facility in the city, and use that water – as much as 230 million gallons a day – to provide a third of LA’s drinking water supply.
UCLA researchers recently analysis plan for the projectwhich was previously known as Operation Next, and found it will significantly bolster local water resilience and bring long-term economic benefits by dramatically reducing the risk of water shortages.
Researchers at UCLA’s Luskin Innovation Center examined about 100,000 potential scenarios, including shortages caused by droughts or major earthquakes that could break aqueducts and cut off outside supplies. They met in reportwhich is funded by DWP and released this week, who has Pure Water LA online will significantly increase the resiliency of the city’s drinking water supply in all scenarios.
“Any way you slice it, our estimate is that the benefits will outweigh the costs,” said Gregory Pierce, director of research at the Luskin Center.
In recent years, Los Angeles has imported nearly 90% of its water, drawing supplies from the Eastern Sierra, the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta and the Colorado River.
“Because climate uncertainty will be the biggest driver of urban water shortages, cities must adapt by developing more reliable local supplies,” Pierce said. “It’s worth making that investment even if the cost is high up front.”
Water passes through one of the clarification tanks at the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Playa Del Rey in 2021.
(Jason Armond/Los Angeles Times)
The cost of Pure Water LA has not been determined. In recent years, various initial estimates have ranged from $6 billion to $20 billion.
The current DWP prepare a plan outlining options for the project. City officials have said it will help move LA towards the goal of 100% recycling of urban waste water in 2035.
While much of the treated water is slated to be used to recharge groundwater basins, the DWP also plans to incorporate “direct potable use,” which includes delivering treated water directly to customers or mixing it with other supplies.
Last year, the California State Water Resources Control Board the laws of the adopted nation allow water utilities to begin developing facilities that feed recycled water that has been treated directly into the drinking water supply. Gonzalez said the DWP will open a small demonstration facility at the department’s complex near Griffith Park to develop treatment technologies and monitoring methods that ensure public health protection.
While the city is developing the largest water recycling project in the country, many questions remain unanswered, including where the purification facility will be located, how the distribution system will be designed, and what construction time will take. , Gold said.
“A clear direction and implementation plan for Pure Water LA is still missing,” he said.
Gold said another key question is how the city’s project at the Hyperion plant in Playa Del Rey will fit in with the Metropolitan Water District’s separate plan for another recycling facility in Carson, called Southern California Pure Water. According to MWD’s latest estimates, the project will cost $8 billion in full and produce 150 million gallons of water per day.
“My concern is, don’t we have time to make that decision so it doesn’t become a separate system,” Gold said. “Because it’s so important, not just for LA but for the region, that the system is integrated.”
He said LA officials need to decide quickly because the current MWD project is at least five years ahead of the city project.
“There are still too many questions, in light of the urgency of making LA a more climate-resistant city when it comes to water resources,” he said.
Others raised additional questions about the city’s approach.
Melanie Winter, who leads a nonprofit called the River Project and advocates for nature-based change in the LA River Watershed, said she’s thrilled the city is completing a water recycling project in the San Fernando Valley, but L.A. should too. focus more on managing its stormwater better. He has advocated for the removal of concrete and pavements in parts of the watershed to capture rainwater and recharge groundwater.
“We need to have a larger share of groundwater recharge that comes from managing rainwater, to get rid of impervious surfaces and release them,” Winter said. “We need to have stormwater as a bigger part of the equation.”
As for future water recycling projects, Winter said he thinks Los Angeles should focus on developing multiple small-scale facilities to ensure redundancy, rather than planning to rely on large centralized systems that he said would be prone to failure due to earthquakes or other issues. danger. He pointed out that the existing infrastructure at the Hyperion plant has a history failures and waste spills.
“We have to think in a more distributed fashion than the centralized system that is currently being imagined and proposed,” said Winter. “When you have a decentralized network, it’s more stable. And they haven’t thought about how to do it.
