By Jeff Clemetson | Editor

San Diego’s most beloved asset, by most accounts, is its weather. The sky is clear and sunny nearly every day. And while we may be the envy of the nation during the cold, damp winters most of the country experiences, our bounty of sunshine does present us with an issue that has become all to clear –– we don’t have enough water.

With the drought now in its fifth year, solutions to our water problem are starting to be seriously addressed.

On Sept. 23, an expert panel held a forum discussion called “The Future of Water,” hosted by La Mesa Conversations, which looked into how our local water districts can develop more sources of water and how to better promote water conservation as a whole.

According to documents from Helix Water District, in 1991, 95 percent of the county’s water was purchased from one source –– the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which is dependent on water from outside the region. Since then, the local water districts have worked to diversify their sources –– the new desalination plant in San Onofre, for example.

However, according to the Future of Water panel, there is one new water source that is favored by environmentally-minded conservationists and fiscally-minded water district managers alike –– potable reuse, or, recycled water.

After the Future of Water discussion, the La Mesa Courier sat down with Helix Water General Manager Carlos Lugo and Director of Water Quality and Systems Operations Mark Umphries to further explain Helix Water’s plans to expand potable reuse for its customers.

Feasibility of potable reuse facility for Helix 

Potable reuse water isn’t new to San Diego. In fact, there is a Pure Water treatment plant at Metro in Point Loma and a small test facility at Padre Dam. A feasibility study is also underway to determine how cost-effective it would be for Helix to be a part of Padre Dam’s plans to build a larger facility.

“We’re all hoping that the cost of that [water] is comparable to what we buy from Northern California or the Colorado River,” said Umphries, noting that water purchased from those sources are still cheaper than purchasing desalination.

The proposed plan in the feasibility study would treat wastewater to a pure level then blend with local reservoirs, which would then be treated again before delivery to customers. Umphries said that the treated wastewater is actually cleaner than the reservoir water and could be put into the system straight out of treatment but the blending is still a required step in the process.

“You make it less pure, but that’s the way the regulations are,” Umphries said. “Right now they want you to put it through what’s called an environmental barrier.”

Oddly enough, a possible EPA regulatory barrier for Metro’s current wastewater treatment facility could lead to making the Helix/Padre Dam facility even more likely.

Currently, Metro enjoys a waiver that allows it to discharge “advanced” primary waste, which contains a “fair amount of soluble and organic” material but has been treated with chemicals, Umphries said. Most treatment plants can only deposit secondary waste, which is free of organic material.

“In certain areas, like if you were not going into an ocean but in a lake, [primary waste] would consume all the oxygen and create all kinds of environmental problems,” he said. “San Diego has had an interesting history and they had the Scripps Institute of Oceanography look at it and they said where we discharge this advanced primary there’s really not a negative impact. They even argue that it creates more marine life because there’s a food source going out.”

However, the EPA is reluctant to continue the waiver for San Diego’s treatment facility because it has forced all the other treatment facilities to put in secondary treatment.

“All those other treatment facilities are required to have a higher level of treatment that ours does,” Lugo said.

What this means for Metro is if the EPA pulls the waiver in a bid to make everyone play by the same rules, a secondary treatment facility could cost up to $3 billion.

“So if you’re a member of Metro, and if you build your own facilities and you stop discharging into Metro, you would avoid paying for those future costs for Metro going to secondary treatment,” Umphries said.

Metro itself would benefit by the building of more water purification facilities because the decreased load of wastewater that ends up in the ocean may convince the EPA to allow it to maintain the exemption and therefore avoid paying for the expensive secondary waste upgrade.

“They are trying to satisfy the EPA requirements and the other regulators by reducing by half the amount of sewage they are taking into Point Loma by taking this water and turning it into hydro-purified wastewater at the source,” Lugo said. “So in essence, their input to the ocean is decreased.”

Because of the looming decision by the EPA on whether San Diego Metro will need to build a secondary treatment facility or not, a decision by Helix and Padre Dam will have to be made sometime soon.

“The people working on the city’s program want to know about the Padre Dam project because they need to plan on what level of flows it can expect from all the other water districts it serves,” Umphries said, adding that it is also possible that Metro will just expand its own Pure Water facility and increase the amount of water that is treated.

“I suspect, looking many years down the road, one way or another, [the wastewater] is still going to get reclaimed,” he said.

So whether Helix and Padre Dam build their own water purification facility, or if they chose to continue to send wastewater to the Metro facility will depend on one thing.

“Again, it will have to make sense for our rate payers, from a cost standpoint,” Lugo said. “Depending on what the feasibility study tells us, we may or may not proceed to the next step. We are going to be very incremental about it before we invest a lot of money in this project.”

––Write to Jeff Clemetson at [email protected]