The Water Cycle : City Dedicates Project That Uses Reclaimed Effluent to Irrigate

Los Angeles officials Tuesday dedicated the city’s largest reclaimed water project, which will use treatment plant effluent for irrigation and save enough water to meet the yearly needs of 3,200 families.

Measured against the goal of using recycled water to supply 40% of the city’s needs by 2010, officials acknowledged that the reclamation scheme--dubbed the Los Angeles Greenbelt Project--is a mere drop in the bucket.

But they said the long-awaited project--which will deliver recycled water to two cemeteries, a golf course and Universal Studios--represents an important milestone in the effort to secure enough water for a growing population.

“Our resources are diminishing. If we can find ways of conserving our limited supply, we should do it,” said City Council President John Ferraro at a ceremony at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in the Hollywood Hills.

In addition to Forest Lawn, the $6.1-million project will deliver 1,600 acre-feet--or about 525 million gallons of water a year--from the Los Angeles-Glendale Water Reclamation Plant to Universal Studios, Lakeside Golf Club in Toluca Lake and Mt. Sinai Memorial-Park, bordering Griffith Park.

The water will flow through a five-mile-long pipeline large enough to deliver 9,000 acre-feet if more customers sign up, said Jerry Gewe, engineer of water resources for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.

As an incentive to use reclaimed water, the four customers will pay about 60% of normal rates. The recycled water also will not be subject to drought-related restrictions imposed on some other customers.

The water “is great stuff, the price is right, and I thank you all very much for this,” John Llewellyn, general manager of Forest Lawn, said at the dedication.

Although the city has other reclamation projects under construction or in the planning stages, its only other completed project went on line about 1979. It uses 1,000 acre-feet per year to water public golf courses in Griffith Park and nearby Caltrans rights of way.

“We’re definitely far behind” some areas in using reclaimed water, Gewe said. “On the other hand, we’re moving ahead. . . . We will be tripling our use of reclaimed water within a year here,” he said.

Another reclamation project is scheduled to go on-line later this summer in Sepulveda Basin, where 1,200 acre-feet of water from the Tillman sewage treatment plant is to be used each year to water golf courses. Tillman water also will be piped to Lake Balboa, the new boating and fishing lake in the basin.

A second phase of the basin project, scheduled for completion next year, will involve using an additional 2,300 acre-feet per year of Tillman water for irrigation.

A more ambitious proposal is the East Valley Water Reclamation Project, which could begin operation in 1995 at the earliest. Unlike most reclamation projects--which stretch supplies of potable water by using treated effluent instead--the East Valley project would replenish drinking water supplies.

About 35,000 acre-feet per year would be piped from Tillman to ground water spreading basins in Sun Valley and Pacoima. The water would seep through the ground to city water supply wells in North Hollywood, filtered naturally by sand and gravel along the way.

For more than two decades, the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts have used waste water from sewage plants to replenish aquifers tapped by public wells in southern Los Angeles County.

In Orange County, several water utilities have moved aggressively to develop reclaimed water, using it for everything from irrigation and ground water recharge to flushing toilets in office buildings.

Asked why Los Angeles has been slow to embrace water reclamation, Gewe replied, “I guess you call it lack of vision. The status quo was easy to maintain,” he said, adding that the idea of using treated effluent was slow to gain acceptance.

Bahman Sheik, director of the Department of Public Works’ office of water reclamation, said the city’s seemingly limitless supplies of Owens Valley and Mono Basin water also worked against water recycling.

“We’ve been lucky in the past, because we’ve had water to burn,” he said. “We had our own sources of water from the Eastern Sierra, and it seemed it would last indefinitely.

“But in recent years, all sources of water have been threatened by environmental, legal and political events,” Sheikh said. “Each one of the traditional sources has its own set of problems. . . . Each one of the sources is finite.”

“We’ve come to a point where others have come earlier in recognizing that we have to use our water more efficiently,” Sheikh said.

The Los Angeles Greenbelt project is the 20th to benefit from an incentive program offered by the Metropolitan Water District, wholesale supplier of water to Los Angeles and six other Southern California counties.

As part of its effort to encourage water recycling, the MWD will pay the Department of Water and Power a rebate of $154 for every acre-foot of water supplied by the greenbelt project. The rebate, totaling about $250,000 per year, will offset the difference between the cost of building the project and income from sales of reclaimed water.