Santa Barbara in a Frantic Quest for Water

The water shortage is so critical in Santa Barbara that local officials are considering a number of unusual proposals to bring in emergency supplies, including importing Canadian water by barge, building the country’s largest seawater desalination plant and using an oil pipeline to transport water from Northern California.

Water has become such a valuable commodity that one Santa Barbara engineering firm is now wildcatting for water--instead of oil. The firm recently located an underground supply, drilled a well and is now negotiating with the city over the price of the water.

“Anybody that can supply us with some water, we’ll listen to,” said Santa Barbara City Councilwoman Jeanne Graffy. “We can’t afford to rule anything out.”

City officials have set April 20 as the deadline for proposals to provide the city with emergency water supplies. The officials then plan to sift through the options and make recommendations to the City Council.

Although most of California is suffering from a drought, the water shortage in the Santa Barbara area may be the most severe. Unlike most of Southern California, Santa Barbara and other cities along the parched Central Coast are not connected to any water sources in Northern California or to Colorado River water, so they must rely almost entirely on rain and ground water supplies. And Santa Barbara, which has minimal ground water, is entering its seventh year without adequate rainfall.

The City Council, faced with a nearly 50% water shortage for the year, banned lawn watering in late February and sharply increased water rates. Since then, water use has decreased about 40%, said Mayor Sheila Lodge.

The city also embarked on an all-out search for water. City officials recently contacted about 100 engineering firms and other businesses throughout the country and placed advertisements in a number of newspapers, seeking proposals for alternative water sources.

As part of the effort, the City Council allocated $100,000 toward the study of desalination plants. Desalinating sea water is an innovative--and expensive--method for a community to deal with a water shortage. And unlike most of the emergency measures the city is investigating, desalination could provide the area with a long-term water source.

A few cities in Florida have plants to remove salt from “brackish” water--found in swamps--and there are some small seawater desalinating plants throughout the country. But Santa Barbara could become the nation’s first city to use a large-scale desalinating plant as a major source of water, said Bruce Burnworth, assistant director of the city’s Public Works Department.

City officials are reviewing a proposal to build a desalination plant that could provide almost a third of Santa Barbara’s future annual water supply. Building such a plant could cost up to $50 million. Rather than pay for it with taxpayer funds, the city would prefer that a private firm build and operate the plant, then sell the water to the city, Burnworth said.

Such a desalination plant could be built and provide usable water as early as the fall of 1991, Burnworth said. Cost of water from the plant would be extremely high--about $3,000 an acre-foot (about 325,000 gallons of water--generally considered a year’s supply for about 10 people). The city currently pays $35 an acre-foot for reservoir water it receives.

Bob Quinn, a senior civil engineer with the city, said of the desalination plant proposal: “It’s a water source you can always count on. It’s definitely feasible, but the cost is high, so the question will be whether the city’s willing to pay the price.”

Importing water from Canada would cost about the same as buying desalinated water, but it would be used only as a short-term emergency supply, Quinn said. Several Canadian companies have proposed bringing in water by large barges or refitted oil tankers, up to 1,000 acre-feet a month. The ships could be moored at a pier, Quinn said, and a pipeline would run directly from the ship to the city’s main water pipeline.

“It would be like having the Arrowhead water man delivering to you, except instead of dropping a bottle on your doorstep, the water would be pumped right into the city’s water system,” Quinn said. “The advantage of this is we could get some emergency supplies very quickly . . . maybe a matter of months.”

The county water agency, which is investigating alternative water sources in conjunction with the city, is currently attempting to obtain 10,000 acre-feet of water in the next two years. The agency is negotiating with a firm that recently built an oil pipeline from the Santa Barbara area to Texas. Local officials hope to temporarily use a small section of the never-used pipeline to transport water from the San Joaquin Valley to Santa Barbara and nearby cities.

Other short-term proposals local officials are considering to deal with the water crisis include expanding the use of specially treated sewage water on city parks, golf courses and other landscaping, and paying county farmers not to grow crops that require extensive irrigation.

Lake Cachuma, which supplies the Santa Barbara area with the majority of its water, was designed to tolerate a seven-year drought, the longest recorded for the area when the reservoir was built in the 1950s. But now the reservoir is at its lowest point ever. Meanwhile, Gibraltar Reservoir near Montecito, which in the past had provided the city with about 30% of its water, ran dry in November.

Until Santa Barbara is able to obtain emergency water supplies, residents will be forced to increase their conservation efforts, said Mayor Lodge.

“During the last few months, conservation efforts have been a great help,” Lodge said. “Hopefully, we can cut our use down to the point so at least we’ll know we’ll have water for next year.”