Water Snubbed Today May Look Good Tomorrow

Earle Hartling made his way along catwalks above the sewage, bathed in mid-morning sunshine. Underneath him, in concrete tanks, roiled the tawny-colored waste water from the sinks and the toilets of the San Gabriel Valley.

A musty odor here, a decided stench there. And the antiseptic smell of chlorine wafted in the gentle breeze across the nine-acre expanse of one of the state’s largest sewage treatment plants, at San Jose Creek near the intersection of the San Gabriel and the Pomona freeways.

Hartling, an engineer with the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County, is an expert on the matter of transforming sewage into usable water.

He peered down into a concrete opening where the finished product rushed away like a waterfall: Clear, clean water, almost--but not quite--good enough to drink, tumbled into a huge pipe.

“You’d have to drink a gallon a day for 875 years before you’d contract the only virus we’ve ever found and it still wouldn’t even make you sick,” Hartling said.

Swim, but Don’t Drink

Millions of gallons of this water, considered by health officials to be clean enough for swimming but not for drinking, rush through the pipe every day. Eventually it flows into the concrete banks of the San Gabriel River, which winds to the ocean at Long Beach. But millions more gallons are diverted into the ground to indirectly replenish the water supply for portions of Los Angeles County, a desert that water has made into a patchwork of manicured lawns, golf courses, orchards and gardens.

To boost the water supply that serves 1 million people in the San Gabriel Valley, from Monterey Park east to San Dimas, water officials had proposed pumping water from the San Jose Creek plant upriver to Irwindale. There, through a system of tanks and pipes, the water would have been fed into the earth around Irwindale.

But a Los Angeles Superior Court judge last month said no to this idea.

Judge Florence Pickard reached this conclusion after she toured the catwalks at San Jose Creek and then held a day-long hearing. She decided that, as long as water suppliers in the San Gabriel Valley can afford to buy imported water of a higher quality than that produced at San Jose, she would not be willing to give her approval for reclaimed waste water to be pumped into the Irwindale water table, 4 1/2 miles northeast of the San Jose plant.

‘Understand Her Caution’

“We can’t be particularly mad at her,” said Ralph B. Helm, attorney for the Upper San Gabriel Water District. “We understand her caution. But we did think our plan was a good idea.”

The judge’s approval was necessary due to complicated legal agreements reached in 1973 when rules were set forth saying court permission would be required to use reclaimed water.

To pump the renovated water into San Gabriel Valley would not have been an extraordinary event in the region. For decades, waste water reclaimed by a sewage treatment plant in Pomona has irrigated fields, cemeteries, golf courses, schoolyard ball fields and hospital grounds. It has supplied factories with water they need to make their products, such as paper. In addition, Cal Poly Pomona uses the water for irrigation.

Extensive use around Pomona, Hartling said, dates as far back as 1904, when citrus growers processed sewage into water clean enough to use on crops. And just as the citrus growers of long ago found the partial answer to their water needs, Hartling and other water experts say, this recycled, reclaimed, repaired water may provide partial answers for the future water problems of Southern California.

Plant Expansions

Already, the city of Los Angeles is expanding its water reclamation plants. The Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County operate one of the state’s largest water reclamation projects, as a by-product of its sewage treatment operations at 10 plants in the county. Two plants, including the largest at San Jose Creek, are near Whittier Narrows and the third in the San Gabriel Valley is in Pomona. Others are in Cerritos, Long Beach, Lancaster, Saugus, Palmdale, Valencia and La Canada-Flintridge.

But half of the water produced at these plants eventually goes unused, much of it flowing directly into the ocean. This water, Hartling said, could supply the annual needs of hundreds of thousands of people.

“We all realize there is an upcoming water supply shortage in Southern California. And water from the (San Jose) plant is being wasted to the ocean,” Robert G. Berlien, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District.

Economics partly contributes to the fact that the treated water isn’t being used. But as the cost of imported water increases, economics may one day cause water companies to seek ways to acquire the water.

In stating the case for reclaimed water, Hartling--whose job is to sell people on using the water--makes several points. Due to legal actions, he said, the amount of water coming from the Colorado River to Southern California will be cut in half in the 1990s. And he said population growth, along with water consumption, is occurring at a rapid rate.

Berlien said “there would be a net savings eventually to users,” if the reclaimed water was piped into the valley.

Pipeline and Pump

Initially, however, there would be the expense of building a pumping station to send the water from San Jose Creek to Irwindale via a pipeline, which also would have to be built. But, Berlien said, reclaimed water is about a third cheaper than water imported from Northern California and outside the state.

“Reclaimed water would benefit everybody in the San Gabriel Valley,” Berlien said. “It would be an additional source. There’s a shortage of imported water. It’s a dependable supply that’s being wasted.”

But Helm said: “It’s not that urgent to us. We’ve got this great big basin we can mine.”

Much of the water in the San Gabriel Valley is served by wells in a basin suffering from what state officials consider to be a victim of the worst case of ground-water pollution in California.

The reclaimed water would have supplemented the water table, which feeds those wells. And through the process of percolating into the ground, the water eventually would have become pure enough to drink.

Water officials in the San Gabriel Valley say they are debating whether to ask the judge to reconsider her decision.