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Chapter 9: Reliability Through Diversification
was beneficially reused within the Water
Authority’s service area. The Water Authority’s
member agencies
plan to use al
most
40,000 acre-feet of
recycled water per
year by 2020.
In addition, the
Water Authority’s
largest
member
agency, the city
of San Diego,
thoroughly investi-
gated a more novel
approach to water
recycling that involves using highly treated
recycled water to augment surface water sup-
plies. The city’s concept is to pipe highly puri-
fied water 22 miles from a proposed treatment
plant to San Vicente Reservoir, where it would
mix with other supplies before being treated
again to meet all state and federal drinking
water standards, and then distributed to cus-
tomers. In 2009, San Diego embarked on a
demonstration project that supported the tech-
nology’s promise,
5
and the City Council is
expected to evaluate the potential for full-scale
“indirect potable reuse” in 2013. If the city
moves ahead and state regulators give the
green light, it would take approxi
mately
10 years to build the plant and pipeline.
While the prospect of
recycling wastewater
into drinking water faced
public skepticism in the
1990s and early 2000s,
opinion polls showed
that the process has
become increasingly
palatable to the public.
More than 7 in 10
respondents to the
Water Authority’s 2012
survey believed it’s pos-
sible to make recycled water pure and safe for
drinking – up from 28 percent in 2005.
6
TAPPING GROUNDWATER
Unlike Los Angeles and Orange counties,
groundwater in San Diego County is con-
strained by the region’s geology. However,
even li
mited groundwater is a valuable
local source.
Many local groundwater basins contain water
that is too salty for drinking – some are natural-
ly salty, as settlers discovered in the 1800s,
and others have become salty because of
irrigation and seawater intrusion due to
Recycled water is used for lawn and landscape irrigation
and other non-potable (non-drinking) uses