Despite Drought, San Diego Is Dumping Treated Water
By Sara Jerome,
@sarmje
California is entering its fifth year of drought, but one city recently dumped a half-billion gallons of expensive, treated drinking water.
San Diego’s water supply is reaching “absurd” proportions, according to Voices of San Diego.
“The San Diego County Water Authority has dumped a half billion gallons of costly drinking water into a lake near Chula Vista. Now that drinking water has been poured into a lake, the water must be treated a second time before humans can consume it,” the report said. “That’s a very small portion of the County Water Authority’s annual water supplies, but still roughly as much water as 14,000 people use in a year.”
The dumped supply includes water from San Diego County’s desalination plant, the largest in the western hemisphere, which opened in December after 15 years of development and $1 billion in spending. “Ratepayers will now have to shell out an additional quarter-million dollars to retreat the water so it’s again fit for human consumption,” Voices of San Diego reported.
Why is San Diego dumping treated water? The report blamed four factors: “stubborn water politics, pipeline physics, unexpectedly low demand and the restrictive terms of a contract the County Water Authority signed with water desalination company Poseidon Resources.”
The county must buy water from the desalination plant under the contract. Demand, meanwhile, is low because of mandatory water cuts imposed by the governor. The county authority has complained that under the mandate, “it wasn’t getting any credit” for investing in the desalination plant, The Sacramento Bee reported.
The County Water Authority blames “its main supplier of water, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, for sending too much water and has asked it to stop,” the report said. But Metropolitan has said it cannot stop without physically changing the pipeline.
Despite the current challenges, officials continue to defend the desalination plant.
“We have built in resources not for this year, next year — but we have built in resources for the next 30 years,” said Mark Weston, chairman of the County Water Authority’s board of directors.
For more on the issues surrounding California’s lasting drought, visit Water Online’s Water Scarcity Solutions Center.