Yuma Desalination Plant Comes of Age--Too Late : Colorado River: Project is opening 14 years behind schedule. Onetime ‘showpiece’ may be obsolete.

It was hatched during the Nixon era, billed as a sure-fire technological fix to a problem that had strained the country’s relations with Mexico to the breaking point.

The trouble was the Colorado River. Fouled by agricultural runoff in the United States, the river had become so choked with salts that it was poisoning crops on Mexican farms near the end of its 1,400-mile run from the Rockies to the sea.

Experts took up the ticklish problem, and suggested this remedy--build a mammoth desalting plant just above the border in Yuma. The project, backers pledged, would not only clean up the river for Mexico but also become an American showpiece--a model for the fledgling desalination industry.

This month, the plant’s operators are preparing to flip the switch and bring their behemoth to life. But there is no champagne on ice.

Beset by technical glitches, design changes and lawsuits, the Yuma plant is opening 14 years late at a whopping price of $258 million--more than five times the original estimate. The plant’s debut is so overdue, some experts say, that the gleaming government “showpiece” is, in some ways, already obsolete.

“This plant is going to be a white elephant when it’s finished, and it probably will not achieve its intended function,” said Rep. George E. Brown Jr. (D-Colton), who fought to kill the project in 1979. “The question is, can we learn something from this to warrant the terrible misuse of taxpayer dollars? At this point, I don’t know.”

Federal auditors share Brown’s horror at the soaring costs and plan to launch a full-scale audit of the project this month. In a scathing report, they suggested that Congress consider scrapping the plant.

Some industry leaders lament that the troubled project has tarnished the image of desalination at a time when the technology is just taking off--particularly in drought-cursed California.

And other critics point out that Mexico’s troubles--the reason the plant was authorized in the first place--were solved 18 years ago, when officials rerouted a particularly salty stream of runoff that was polluting the Colorado River. Given that, some analysts wonder: Is this plant, which will cost at least $32 million a year to operate, a wise investment?

“I am personally surprised the Yuma project wasn’t shut down as a failure many years ago,” said R. Philip Hammond, a Santa Monica desalination consultant with 30 years in the business. “In view of the state of the federal budget, I think it should be abandoned because it wasn’t a good idea in the first place.”

The plant’s sponsors at the U. S. Bureau of Reclamation are accustomed to such barbs. They concede that their project has been plagued by costly delays and technical problems, but say they were given a difficult mission at a time when desalting was a relatively young technology in this country.

Bureau Commissioner Dennis Underwood insists that the plant will prove its detractors wrong, fulfilling its promise and advancing the science of desalination. Yet, he concedes that his agency--best known for building dams--has “a long way to go” in reducing costs and improving efficiency at Yuma.

“I’d like to have the plant on line today and know that it runs effectively,” Underwood said. “I’d like to say we’ve reduced its operating costs to the minimum necessary. . . . We’re working on that.”

Standing here in the Arizona desert, it is hard to imagine that the Colorado River was once among the nation’s mightiest rivers, a raging, unpredictable torrent that gouged the Grand Canyon. In less than a century, six major dams and countless other human manipulations have transformed the waterway, creating a string of quiet pools that ends in a trickle several miles shy of the river’s historic union with the Gulf of California.

The taming of the Colorado allowed the West to flourish, but it has not come without a price--a doubling of the river’s salinity since the early 1900s. Much of the blame rests with irrigation water, which picks up salts as it percolates through soil on its journey back to the river. Withdrawals of water by cities and farmers compound the problem, leaving less in the river to dilute the accumulating salts.

Each year, 9 million tons of salt flow down the Colorado, causing damage that the Bureau of Reclamation estimates at more than $311 million in California, Nevada and Arizona. Farmers suffer through harm to crops and lower yields; cities and industries pay a price in higher treatment costs and accelerated deterioration of pipes and equipment.

As historians will attest, salinity can become a calamitous problem. The Sumerian civilization of ancient Mesopotamia--nourished to greatness by the Euphrates River--collapsed around 2000 BC, largely because of salt buildup in the soil. To protect farmers in the western United States from a similar fate, the Bureau of Reclamation is spending more than $1 billion on a potpourri of salinity-control measures along the Colorado.

No one has suffered more harm from the river’s salinity than those at the end of the proverbial pipe--the Mexicans who tap the Colorado to raise cotton, asparagus and onions in the bone-dry Mexicali Valley, just south of the border.

In 1961, their salt troubles reached crisis levels when Arizona farmers in the Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District near Yuma began discharging briny runoff into the Colorado. This discharge pushed the river’s salt content beyond the tolerable point. Huge patches of the Mexicali Valley were contaminated, and crops began to die.

Mexico protested feverishly, but the response from the White House was sluggish. Under a 1944 treaty, the United States is required to provide Mexico with 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year. But the treaty does not say this water must be of usable quality.

Finally, President Richard M. Nixon took on the problem, appointing a commission to find a way out of the salt mess.

Many options were considered, among them two that seemed the most obvious--buying out the farmers in the Wellton-Mohawk district, thereby eliminating their offensive discharge, and releasing more water from dams upstream to dilute the river’s saltiness.

The commission rejected the buy-out approach, concluding that it was unfair to penalize one group of farmers for a salt problem to which all river users contributed.

As for the dilution remedy, the seven states that rely on the Colorado for drinking and agricultural water were adamantly opposed: With the river oversubscribed, the states were not about to sacrifice one drop of their water to solve a salt problem for Mexico.

And so, in 1973, the commission chose a far more ambitious solution--the world’s largest reverse osmosis desalting plant, designed to capture the Wellton-Mohawk runoff, run it through an elaborate treatment system and pump the cleansed water into the river.

To cure the salt problem while the plant was being built, the Bureau of Reclamation dug a ditch to bypass the salty Wellton-Mohawk runoff around the river and into the Gulf of California. This simple, inexpensive measure has worked well, but it has a downside that prevents officials from adopting it as a long-term solution--the United States cannot count the diverted runoff toward the amount of river water it must provide to Mexico each year.

As soon as plans for the Yuma plant were announced, critics savaged the idea, calling it a boondoggle for the Wellton-Mohawk farmers and questioning why taxpayers should bear the burden for salt-producing agricultural practices. But Congress approved the plant.

Still, even supporters of the desalter acknowledge that it was politics--not necessarily prudence--that guided the decision.

“We had an international problem and what we ended up with was a political fix,” said David Gudgel, the Bureau of Reclamation’s project manager at Yuma. “The fact is, there were a lot of givens. This was the only solution that met all the constraints applied to the problem.”

There are 100 workers at the Yuma plant. Even though the facility has been up and running in a test mode for months, the place is eerily quiet in the Arizona heat.

Inside, operators perch at a console in a computer control room reminiscent of “Star Trek.” In the lobby, charts illustrate the wonders of the reverse osmosis process, which pumps briny water through plastic membranes that screen out the salts. Visitors, hundreds of whom have toured the plant since its primary components were installed several years ago, also enjoy an astonishing multimedia model of the facility--complete with twinkling lights and an invisible narrator.

It all looks very impressive, and there are those who believe it is: “The plant is really an engineering marvel,” said Jack Jorgensen, a retired Bureau of Reclamation engineer who heads the National Water Supply Improvement Assn. “Its size, its complexity--for an engineer, it’s really fantastic to see.”

At one time, almost everyone in the desalination business shared his ardor. When it was designed in the early 1970s, the plant was 50 times larger than the biggest one of its type. The Yuma project was grand, bold, a major stride forward for the industry. A 1974 government report promised that it would “demonstrate the state of the art for applications nationally and worldwide.”

It has not worked out that way.

“What’s happened in Yuma is a real tragedy,” said William Katz, executive vice president of Ionics Inc., a Massachusetts company whose worldwide desalination work includes a new plant in Santa Barbara. “They’ve come up with something that is terribly late, obsolescent if not obsolete and horribly over budget. All of that certainly gives desalting a black eye.”

The trouble began right at the beginning, with lawsuits from membrane suppliers who failed to win government contracts. Next came funding interruptions, a redesign that reduced the plant’s capacity and in 1979, an attack by the General Accounting Office, which recommended that work on the plant be halted so less expensive alternatives could be studied.

The project weathered that storm, but progress continued at little more than a limp. In the mid-1980s, heavy flows swelled the Colorado River, diluting the pesky salts naturally and making completion of the plant--and the bureau’s need to fund it--less urgent.

At the same time, scientists were battling puzzling problems with the plant’s expensive desalting membranes, which proved particularly susceptible to damage and wear.

In all, the troubles have caused delays that have sent the project’s capital and operation costs skyrocketing. An example: Even in the one out of every four years when high flows in the river mean that the plant is not needed, it will cost almost $11 million to keep it on standby status.

Such numbers have persuaded James Richards, inspector general of the Interior Department, to order a full-scale audit: “Given all the delays and the considerable amount of money that has been spent, we believe . . . the problems need a full airing and should be brought to the attention of Congress,” he said.

The plant’s lengthy gestation period has had at least one other troubling consequence, experts say. The 9,000 plastic membranes that screen out the salts--selected more than a decade ago--are no longer state of the art. Newer membranes have dramatically reduced the amount of energy consumed in desalting, thus reducing one of the system’s key operating costs. The Yuma plant could be retrofitted, but at considerable expense.

Taken together, the plant’s troubles have exhausted the patience of many onetime supporters and prompted some to question whether the entire project should be re-evaluated.

“The Yuma experience has been an embarrassment for the government and an improper management of taxpayer dollars,” said Jack Laughlin, an international desalination consultant based in San Diego County. “And since such an extraordinary amount of time has passed, you wonder, should this project be looked at anew? Is this still the right thing to be doing?

“I don’t know the answer, but they are legitimate questions.”

Cleansing the Water

In 1961, the Colorado River’s salt level became so high it began killing crops in Mexico. A major source of the problem was a stream of salty agricultural runoff dumped by farmers in Arizona’s Wellton-Mohawk Irrigation District, east of Yuma.

A) Temporary solution: The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built a concrete canal to reroute the runoff, discharging it into the Gulf of California. But this means the U.S. cannot count the diverted runoff toward the amount of river water it must provide to Mexico each year.

B) Permanent solution: A $258-million desalting plant at Yuma, which will treat most of the runoff and discharge the clean water into the river.

SALINITY FACTS

Cities from Los Angeles to Phoenix and farms in seven states drink from the Colorado River, which in all serves 20 million people and 2 million acres of cropland. But the dams and other structures that have tamed the Colorado have come with a price--a doubling of the river’s salinity in less than a century.

Its causes:

* Natural springs and geologic formations.

* Irrigation water, which percolates through salty soil and returns to the river.

* Water withdrawals by cities and farmers leave less water downstream for dilution.

Its problems:

* Cities face higher water-treatment costs.

* Farmers suffer crop damage and lower yields.