Districts Take Steps to Stockpile Water Supplies

A decade ago, amid a six-year drought, Ventura considered dragging icebergs from the arctic for fresh water, and some city officials thought squeezing the salt out of seawater was a good idea. Lawns burned and the parched banks of Lake Casitas cracked.

When Ventura balked at building a public university on a bluff over the ocean, water was one big reason why. By the time the rains finally came in 1992, cities throughout the county had imposed strict water rationing.

Now, with drought only a vague memory, hardly anyone talks much about iceberg flotillas or desalting the ocean.

But local officials--fearing the next drought--have quietly begun to hoard water.

Wells are being drilled, underground storage basins are being filled and reserves of brackish ground water are being filtered for drinking or irrigation.

Although no one can predict the next drought, water planners consider the six-year drought that cut county rainfall in half a wake-up call.

And so, like frugal pensioners saving up for a not-so-rainy day, local water districts have filled reservoirs to overflowing, and plans are in the works to use salty ground water when above-ground water is in short supply.

The Calleguas Municipal Water District, which provides 600,000 mostly east Ventura County residents with water imported from Northern California, has been building up a three-year reserve. It has also sunk 14 wells and plans on a total of 30.

The district will soon unveil a plan to draw up mineral-laden ground water, remove impurities, then send the brine out to the ocean along a 30-mile pipeline.

“The drought spurred us on. My personal feeling is that we are drought-proof for anything that has historically happened in California,” said Donald Kendall, general manager of Calleguas. “We could probably go 10 years.”

Port Hueneme is testing three technologies for desalinating ground water for use in the city and the two naval bases. The water produced by these technologies now provides 60% of the city’s supply and that will increase to 80% soon. The remaining water comes from Calleguas.

“I hate to use the word drought-proof,” said Jim Passanisi, water superintendent for the city of Port Hueneme and the Port Hueneme Water Agency, “but it gives us a backup.”

The regional Metropolitan Water District bought land in Oxnard for a desalination facility but has no immediate plans for construction.

The story is the same elsewhere.

A desalination plant is being built in Cambria in San Luis Obispo County. Riverside County recently finished the 800,000-acre-foot Diamond Valley Reservoir. Pasadena is planning the 75,000-acre-foot Raymond Basin and numerous water storage programs are running along the Colorado River and as far away as Desert Center deep in the Mojave. An acre-foot of water supplies two families of four for one year.

It’s a far cry from the early 1990s, when scarce rainfall, depleted reservoirs and a severe drought in Northern California combined to cause panic up and down the coast. About two-thirds of Ventura County’s drinking water comes from spring runoff in the Sierra Nevada. And, there as here, precipitation was a fraction of the usual--just half of the typical 20 inches a year in Ventura, for example.

While Ventura city officials batted around the idea of parking an iceberg offshore to ensure a steady supply of fresh water, others became disciples of desalination.

Santa Barbara citizens were told to cut water use in half. No car washing, lawn sprinkling and unnecessary toilet flushing. Afterward, the city built a $34-million desalination plant.

And then it rained.

Now, water officials are taking a broader approach to water management, utilizing ground water, reservoirs and rivers to guard against drought.

Water Everywhere

Along with plentiful sunshine and moderate temperatures, Ventura County has always been blessed with excess ground water. Early Indians are said to have taken settlers to spots along the coast where fresh water poured out of hillsides into the ocean.

“Cattle ranchers in Port Hueneme could take their cows into the surf for a drink,” said Steven Bachman, ground water resources manager for the United Water Conservation District. “The first wells in Oxnard had enough pressure so that you didn’t need a pump.”

Oxnard still sits atop a pool of water that experts say is 60 to 70 square miles and 50 to 100 feet deep.

“We have so much ground water that it is almost flooding,” Kendall said. “Even in the worst drought we’ll have ground water available.”

Kendall wants to store 300,000 acre-feet of water underground that could last three years. He estimates he will hit his goal by 2008.

In Kendall’s mind, brackish ground water is not only a guardian against drought but also a cheaper alternative to ocean desalination.

He said it costs $500 per acre-foot to produce desalinated ground water while ocean desalination costs about $2,000 a foot.

Dana Wisehart, general manager of the United Water Conservation District, said her sole function is to prepare for drought.

She and her staff spend all year gauging reservoir and river levels, analyzing weather maps and deciding how much water to let out of Lake Piru.

During wet years, the district releases more water to refill aquifers. When it’s dry, it releases less. The biggest windfall was the El Nino rains of 1998. Those rains, said Wisehart, filled the equivalent of Lake Piru twice and continue to fill aquifers.

“We have had the good fortune of a run of wet years,” Wisehart said. “We can probably make it through a seven-year drought.”

United Water stores supplies underground and in Lake Piru for Santa Clara Valley residents and communities of the Oxnard Plain.

Predicting droughts is as dicey as predicting other weather phenomena. Forecasters look at ocean temperatures to determine if El Nino or La Nina conditions will influence weather patterns that year.

“The theory is that the climate is going through a transition phase,” said Terry Schaeffer, meteorologist for the county agricultural commission. “There is a theory that we are heading for a prolonged dry spell.”

That idea is called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO. It says a giant horseshoe-shaped area of the western Pacific goes through 20- to 30-year cycles of having cold water and warm water. Supporters of the theory believe we are now in a warm cycle.

Warm waters influence the atmosphere, producing colder winters in the North and drier temperatures in the Southwest. Cold waters have the opposite effect.

“Potentially we could be in for a decade of 20% less rainfall,” said Bill Patzert, a research oceanographer and climate specialist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. “Nobody knows for sure if there will be a 30-year drought.”

Desalination Loses Luster

Aside for the dozen or so visitors who show up for the annual Water Awareness Week, not much happens at the Charles E. Meyer Desalination Facility in Santa Barbara. All the gauges are firmly at zero and the white pipes, tanks and pumps gather cobwebs in the sun.

Critics call the plant a monument to overreaction while city officials defend it as an example of forward thinking--even if they have already sold off parts to Saudi Arabia.

The facility, built in 1992, is unmanned and sits in a hardscrabble part of the city near a rescue mission.

“We were in a serious drought,” said Bob Ferguson, water supply planner for the city of Santa Barbara. “We were 45% short of water at the time. They predicted an 80% shortage in 1992 if the weather held. You could drive by the Cachuma Reservoir and see the water getting lower and lower.”

Ferguson insisted the desalinated water tasted like it came from the High Sierra and was purer than regular drinking water. There were still complaints, and a local brewery said the water ruined its beer.

Three months after it opened, the plant shut down. But Ferguson said it can be fired up and provide 25% of the city’s water at any time.

“It’s good to know as a planner we can meet a drought when it comes,” he said.

In Ventura, former ocean desalination advocates like Mayor Sandy Smith have changed their tune since the drought.

“I don’t think we need a desalination plant around,” he said. “We could put together a desal plant if we had to but we already have an intricate system of wells and reservoirs.”

In 1993, Steve Bennett, an Ojai educator, led the campaign to build an ocean desalination plant. The Ventura City Council appointed commissions to investigate the feasibility of such a project and decided it wasn’t economical or necessary.

“We don’t need any new water sources right now,” said Bennett, who is running for county supervisor. “We have a water surplus in the west end of the county now. We’ve also been banking water in Lake Casitas.”

Lake Casitas is the principal supplier of water for Ventura and the Ojai Valley.

With technology rapidly changing, water experts counsel against rashly building a plant that could be outdated before it’s finished.

But as facilities get cheaper, United Water’s Bachman thinks ocean desalination will be more common.

“If we were in a 10-year drought, we’d build a desalination plant,” he said.

The droughts of the past seem also to have bred a sense of conservation among ordinary citizens.

“Basically our area is using the same amount of water as it did 10 years ago despite the population growth,” said Rob Hallwachs, spokesman for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which supplies water to 17 million people. “So it would stand to reason that people are using less. I think people here during the drought remember some of its lessons.”

Hallwachs also said more people are using low-flow toilets and shower heads.

So when is the next drought?

No one knows or wants to guess but the weather has been fairly dry the last two years.

“We are monitoring it very closely,” Bachman said. “If we have a dry year next year, I’ll start to worry.”

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Times staff writer Daryl Kelley contributed to this story.