Water Plants Are Decade Behind Schedule

With a deadline just a week away, Los Angeles water officials said Tuesday that they will be a decade late in building a string of costly filtration plants the state has mandated to purify drinking water exposed to the elements in Encino, Hollywood and Stone Canyon reservoirs.

And in their first estimate of the effect on rates, Department of Water and Power officials said the three filtration plants, costing roughly $150 million apiece, could raise the average customer’s water bill by $3.20 per month for 10 years, a rate increase of about 12%.

DWP officials also said the last of the three plants may not be finished until 2003, despite the state deadline of June 29 to have the plants in service. They have applied to the state Department of Health Services for a deadline extension, and for a waiver of a requirement that the department warn customers in the interim that open reservoirs pose risks of water-borne disease.

State and federal regulations require filtration of water from large water storage lakes like the three DWP reservoirs.

The rules reflect concern over bacteria, viruses and other contaminants that might enter the reservoir in storm runoff. The concern is not only that chlorination may not fully destroy microbial impurities, but also that chlorination byproducts, known as trihalomethanes, may be hazardous themselves. The more chlorine used, the more trihalomethanes result.

While stressing that water served to DWP customers meets all applicable health standards, DWP officials have said they support construction of filtration plants--if only to reduce complaints about the taste and odor of highly chlorinated water, and to meet future limits on trihalomethanes in drinking water.

But they said the June 29 deadline has been impossible to meet, due to “the enormous scope” and cost of the construction projects, and continuing negotiations with homeowner groups opposed to having the filtration plants in their neighborhoods.

Bruce W. Kuebler, director of water quality for the DWP, said the agency does not expect to complete the first of the plants, serving lower Stone Canyon Reservoir in Brentwood, until 1996, and may not finish the last, at Encino Reservoir in the hills above Ventura Boulevard until 2003.

In addition to requesting a new timetable, the DWP will ask the Department of Health Services to a waive a requirement that the department issue printed notices warning customers that high microbial contamination poses a risk of “diarrhea, cramps, nausea, and possibly jaundice and any associated headaches, and fatigue.”

If the request is granted, the DWP would still have to tell customers in advertisements and billing notices that it missed the deadline for completing the filtration plants. However, it would be allowed to omit some of the warning language.

Gary Yamamoto, Los Angeles district engineer for the state health department’s office of drinking water, said he agreed the warning language may be “more harsh than it needs to be”--at least for customers served by Encino and lower Stone Canyon reservoirs. But Yamamoto said the service area around the Hollywood Reservoir in the Cahuenga Pass just southeast of Universal City might still get the full-blown warning, because that reservoir sometimes experiences high coliform bacteria levels.