A Hemorrhaging System : Huge Quantities of Water Wasted Daily as the City’s Infrastructure Buckles

Tom Baker knows how to work on a shoestring budget. He’s done it for years, deftly patching sections of the city of San Diego’s aging water-delivery and storage system that a richer city agency would surely have replaced long ago.

So when Flume No. 22 sprang a leak last month, sending thousands of gallons of drinking water cascading into a ravine, the city water utilities supervisor headed out to the 80-year-old redwood waterway--a vital connection between the city of San Diego and two of its nine reservoirs--in the hopes of applying a quick, cheap fix.

“We call ‘em Band-Aids when we’ve repaired them before,” Baker said.

But this time, a Band-Aid wasn’t enough. Last weekend, before Baker and his crew could repair the rotting timbers, Flume No. 22 collapsed into a pile of splintered beams and rusty bolts. Until it is replaced, the millions of gallons of water stored in Barrett Reservoir and Lake Morena in East County will remain outside San Diego’s reach.

This week, as the San Diego City Council considers adopting the city’s first water rate increase since 1987, the demise of Flume No. 22 is dramatic evidence of the challenge faced by the city Water Utilities Department. Lacking sufficient funds, the department has deferred dozens of improvement projects, leaving the city largely reliant on crumbling infrastructure. And every year, inflation pushes up the price of repairs.

Officials say that, without a substantial rate increase--the city staff is expected to request in the neighborhood of 20%--San Diego’s future will probably include more sewage spills and more water delivery failures like the one at Barrett Reservoir.

“What we’re trying to do,” Water Utilities Director Milon Mills says simply, “is keep that from happening.”

Especially during this fifth year of drought, as water conservation measures threaten to cut deeply into the department’s revenues, the need for a rate increase is all the more pressing, said Deputy City Manager Roger Frauenfelder.

As San Diegans cut their water use, the city sells less water. But a great deal of fixed overhead continues to eat away at the city’s budget. No matter how much or how little water consumers buy, Frauenfelder said, certain expenses remain.

“Water-treatment plants still need to be manned,” he said.

Just as the drought strains the department’s finances, however, it also muddies the debate over the rate increase. Having just called upon San Diegans to cut their water use, some City Council members are reluctant to punish those conservation-conscious constituents with a bigger bill.

Mayor Maureen O’Connor, who has suggested that the water department is using the drought as an excuse to raise rates, has sought to give rebates to people who have cut their use 50% from 1989 levels. Councilman Ron Roberts, meanwhile, is wary of passing a rate increase without knowing exactly how the additional revenue will be used.

“I want to know, if we want to add on 10% or whatever number, what is it going to generate in revenues and where is it going?” he said, noting that city water officials have yet to produce a memo they have promised will answer those questions. “I’m not denying there is some need. But altogether too often, the answers we’re getting are very evasive in terms of what exactly is going into these numbers. What are we getting for this money?”

Another political impediment to the rate rise, city staff members say, is that proposals to preserve infrastructure have a tough time competing with more “human” projects, like the recently approved Human Relations Commission or the housing trust fund. By their very nature, sewage pipes and water-treatment facilities are either remote or hidden--out of the public eye, they are largely taken for granted.

Given the difficulty of illustrating infrastructure’s importance, officials acknowledge that, although no one would have wished for Flume No. 22 to give way, it is serving a useful purpose even in its current dilapidated state.

“The Barrett Reservoir flume is a good example” of the kind of project that the city so desperately needs to fund, Frauenfelder said. While most infrastructure is invisible, he said with a laugh, “at least that one’s above ground.”

Even with persuasive examples like that one, however, Frauenfelder says the timing of the proposed rate increase is less than ideal.

“We have the drought, we have the economic downturn, and we have had no (rate) increase in many years. All of those are important factors,” he said. “It’s an unfortunate coincidence.”

Still, some water officials warn that, over time, skimping on up-keep will cost the city more money than it saves.

Even before Flume No. 22 disintegrated, the antiquated water delivery system at Barrett Reservoir was a good example of those hidden costs. For months before the system broke down altogether, water officials confirm, about 25% of the water that flowed out of Barrett was lost en route to San Diego.

Designed in the 1910s to carry 40-million gallons a day, the rickety wooden flumes and cracked concrete channels have long been too fragile to carry more than half that. So most days, about 20-million gallons of public drinking water poured out of Barrett Reservoir and began the trip west.

Some of the water evaporated. Some trickled out of leaks in the flumes and conduits. Some was absorbed into the earth when it flowed into Dulzura Creek. But each day, by the time the precious cargo reached Otay Reservoir just a dozen miles away, about 5 million gallons had been lost--enough to sustain 30 San Diego families for a year.

Especially in the midst of a drought, said Michael D. Madigan, the chairman of the San Diego County Water Authority board, that loss is more than the city can afford.

“When you’re under pressure to husband limited public funds, you can find yourself in a position of postponing important capital improvements. But, in this instance, it’s costing them money,” said Madigan, who is one of 10 who represent the city of San Diego on the board. “That’s free water (they’re losing) that they don’t have to buy from up north.”

Madigan was so struck by a recent tour of the ramshackle flumes leading from Barrett Reservoir that he recently made an impassioned pitch to the San Diego City Council, urging approval of a hefty rate hike to finance much-needed improvements in facilities, maintenance and construction.

“There are parts of the system that aren’t doing well,” he said, remembering his hair-raising walking tour over Barrett’s teetering, wobbly trestles, so ancient that the San Diego Historical Society recently requested that one set be preserved for posterity. “I wasn’t kidding them. I think it’s a problem.”

Madigan is not alone. In a memorandum issued late last month, City Manager Jack McGrory foretold what life would be like if the City Council does not approve a sizable water rate increase (effective this month) and does not agree to pass on to customers a 14.2% increase expected from the Metropolitan Water District, the region’s wholesaler, in July.

The lack of those funds, McGrory said, would lead to budget cuts “of a magnitude which will seriously impair the city’s ability to serve its customers, including the timely maintenance and repair of its capital infrastructure.”

Already, the Water Utilities Department has instituted a hiring freeze. And, last month, it returned a $280,000 piece of lab equipment--a computerized liquid chromatograph used to analyze trace elements in water--that staff members would have used to gather data to meet ever more stringent federal water quality requirements.

“Because we are in this uncertain fiscal condition, we pulled that back,” Frauenfelder said. “We’ll do without that. And that’s typical of the action we’re taking.”

Frauenfelder said that, without the increase, there will probably be layoffs. But eventually, capital improvement will be the big loser. And, if that happens, said Mark Stone, a principal water utilities supervisor who coordinates reservoir maintenance, San Diegans better cross their fingers.

“People take a lot of things for granted. You open up your faucet, and you expect water to be there,” he said as he surveyed the wreckage at Flume No. 22 last week. He is proud of his staff, who he says learned long ago to be creative with limited resources. But, without a rate rise, he said, no amount of ingenuity will prevent problems.

“We’ve grown to understand the flumes will break down once or twice a year, and we plan for that. But, if it happens five or six times a year, we just aren’t prepared for it,” he said. “So what do you do? Leave people without water?”