The Great Wet Hope : Conservation: Waste water may not sound appealing, or even safe, but it’s the key to our future, says city’s water reclamation chief.

Bahman Sheikh is upset by the unnecessary chaos of it all: We are facing the worst drought in Southern California history and still we dump 60 million gallons of “perfectly good water” in the ocean every day.

But the water isn’t good, a visitor protests. It’s used. Dirty. Foul. Polluted with vile stuff that city dwellers flush away.

“It’s water,” says Sheikh. And, for him that’s enough.

After a year as director of water reclamation for the city of Los Angeles, Sheikh is still trying to convince us that we can’t afford to waste our waste.

“Used” water from toilets, sinks and showers must be treated at the city’s existing reclamation plants and reused, he says, instead of being shunted out to sea.

He is here on a three-year contract to show how it can be done, to propose plans and goals. And when we finally start recycling, he says, we will realize just how wet and green this city can be.

Sheikh understands that used water does not sound appetizing. Or even safe. But he promises it can be both. That’s why he was hired, the Great Wet Hope, a man whose technical knowledge is exceeded only by his optimistic zeal.

Where there is now drought and scarcity, Sheikh foresees saturation. Where there are brown trees, stunted shrubs and arid landscapes, he envisions lush foliage. Recycled water is the wave of L.A.’s future, he says. It will make unnecessary and obsolete such troublesome drought measures as bricks in the toilet tank, short showers and water rationing. “If we were recycling now, we wouldn’t have to worry about any of that,” he explains.

“Water is my life,” Sheikh says, leaning forward with an earnest grin, unembarrassed by the passion in his voice. “Water is life, actually. We are creatures of water, we evolved in it, we came up out of it. Our bodies are mostly water.” But it doesn’t make sense to flush our toilets with drinking water, as we now do. Or to sprinkle freeway shrubs, golf courses and cemeteries with the same potable water that flows from kitchen taps.

Despite media gloom and doom, Sheikh says, Mother Nature isn’t playing unusual tricks: There is no less water in the world; there are just more people using and polluting it. The ground-water level is not suddenly low. It has been diminishing since the 1930s, because we have grown so much and are taking more out than has gone in.

And though the drought may be unusually long, it is part of a regional pattern that has existed for at least 200 years. We will have more wet seasons and more droughts, he says soothingly. And more problems with water unless we start recycling.

The city of Los Angeles recycles less than 1% of its water, which is piped into two golf courses in Griffith Park. When Sheikh’s proposals finally take effect (the City Council has voted to recycle 40% of L.A.’s waste water by the year 2010), pipes will radiate throughout L.A.

They will bring reclaimed water to parks, golf courses, and other major water users throughout the city. Eventually, if Sheikh’s vision comes to pass, the city’s used water would be so effectively processed and distribution pipes so widely dispersed that even homes and apartment houses could benefit.

“Recycled water,” he explains, “is basically sewage that ordinarily would flow to oceans or rivers. Instead, it goes through three separate cleansing processes, after which it is treated with high levels of chlorine to make sure no bacteria, germs or pathogens are left. At that point, it becomes almost as good as drinking water.

“If you accidentally gulped some, nothing bad would happen.”

Such water could be used for most purposes, says Sheikh, citing the Irvine Ranch water district in Orange County: “It is one of the water recycling pioneers in this whole country. They treat almost all their waste water to required levels, then distribute it to users through a separate piping system. They have just installed the first pipes bringing recycled water to toilets in an office building.”

He says some mechanics for recycling are already in place in Los Angeles. Millions of gallons of water undergo all three cleansing processes every day at two reclamation plants in the San Fernando Valley. “Unfortunately, all that usable water flows right to the ocean,” Sheikh says. He is trying to change this, and finding some success.

“The Department of Public Works is making sure that reclaimed water is of adequate quality,” he says. “The Department of Parks and Recreation is accepting water for park irrigation. Department of Water and Power engineers are designing systems for about a dozen projects. We expect to spend $800 million in the next 10 years on water reclamation.”

Some ideas he doesn’t even bother to suggest. Recycled water for drinking? People still have “a psychological problem with that,” Sheikh says, “although when properly treated, it is just as sparkling and pure as water from anywhere else.”

Then again, there aren’t many places he can name--aside from one very dry city in South Africa--where recycled water is used for drinking. At least not directly.

But he says about 800,000 people in northern Virginia indirectly receive recycled drinking water, although they probably don’t realize it.

The Upper Occoquan Sewage Authority is a water reclamation plant for four northern Virginia jurisdictions. Millard Robbins, authority executive director, confirms that “sewage is treated at the plant, held for 30 days in a reservoir at the plant site, then sent downstream in a river tributary to a drinking water reservoir, where it mixes with other drinking water used by residents.”

This brings Sheikh full circle to his beloved hydrologic cycle and to his theory that all water in the world, no matter where it comes from, has been recycled many times.

“Every drop of water that ever existed from the beginning of time is still here,” he says, sounding like a sixth-grade science teacher. “It keeps going through the same cycle, over and over again. It gets used, evaporates, goes into the sky in the form of clouds and gets dispersed again. It falls on mountains, on oceans, some goes into the ground water. You pull it back up, use it, put it back into the ocean or the river. Then it goes through the cycle over again.”

It is all so elegantly simple, he says. People must understand that when humans recycles water, they are just short-circuiting nature’s own process.

River water, he explains, is recycled, too: “The Colorado, for example, goes through many communities before it gets to us. These communities dump waste water in the river, the next community downstream picks it up, purifies it, uses it, then dumps it back for the next community. So the river itself becomes a recycling system.”

Most major rivers in America serve as both sources of water and as waste-water repositories. Once you realize that, Sheikh says, the recycling concept makes a lot of sense. Instead of getting other people’s dirty water from a river and cleaning it, we would be cleaning water we already have.

Some people confuse the term gray water with recycled water, he says. Gray water is untreated waste water, excluding fecal material, which comes from people’s homes and is reused by those people. It is “kind of iffy,” Sheikh says, because health experts worry that it may be contaminated by those who wash diapers, or inadvertently put other germs in the water.

At the request of the Los Angeles City Council, Sheikh has investigated gray water systems functioning in Santa Barbara, and will oversee a small pilot project here. He says gray water might come in handy if the drought became catastrophic before enough recycled water were available. But it is not a substitute for recycled water.

The Iranian-born engineer, 52, received his doctorate in soil science from the University of California at Davis, but soon went into water recycling because it is “the new frontier.”

In California, “we have advanced the recycling art with stringent standards--we know what level of treatment is needed for each specific use,” Sheikh says. “For example, today we can use recycled water to irrigate crops that are eaten raw.”

From 1980 to 1985 he was project manager of a Monterey County field test that grew lettuce with recycled water.

“We compared lettuce grown with well water beside lettuce grown with reclaimed water. We ran hundreds of thousands of tests on both sets of crops. We tested for microbial content, for virus, for heavy metals, for various chemicals. We tested the leaf, the root zone, the soil. We compared one against the other, statistically, for five years,” he says.

“And we proved that the lettuce grown with reclaimed water” was just as good as the other lettuce. As a result, a system is being designed to use recycled water for about 10,000 acres of vegetables, including lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower and artichokes.

Sheikh foresees a time when “Los Angeles will stand alone, a pioneer in recycling,” with no water problems even during long droughts. But that may depend on how persuasive he can be.

It isn’t easy convincing people who think the only good water comes from mountain springs or the heavens above, he agrees, but he’s not afraid to try: “I have no vested interest here. My contract will expire in two years, and I will be gone.”

He hopes to leave a wet legacy.