IRVINE : District Will Sell Its Surplus Water

The Irvine Ranch Water District, fearing the worst, socked away a lot of extra water in preparation for a hot and thirsty summer that never materialized.

Now sitting in Irvine Lake is about 2 billion gallons of water that it doesn’t need, district conservation director Greg Heiertz said.

Having extra water might sound like a good plan, but Irvine Lake collects rainwater during the rainy season. If the lake is too full, the runoff is wasted, Heiertz said.

So the Irvine district found a solution: sell the extra water to the Orange County Water District, which will use it to recharge the county’s drier-than-normal ground-water basin.

The Orange County Water District manages much of the county’s underground basin, which supplies about 75% of the water used by the northern half of the county.

The district will pump the water into a storage tank along Santiago Creek and percolate it into the ground in deep pits that were dug during gravel excavations several years ago.

Once the water enters the basin, it will supply drinking-water wells used by Tustin, Orange, Santa Ana, Irvine and Costa Mesa, water district officials said.

Up to 8,000 acre-feet of the lake’s water, purchased from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California in anticipation of heavy summer demand, will be sold at cost, Heiertz said.