Water, Water Everywhere…
» English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner includes the famous verse,
“Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink.”
That is how things appear in Southern California, bordered by the majestic Pacific Ocean. But the reality is that San Diego, like most cities in the arid Southwest, is facing a water crisis. The San Diego region imports 90 percent of its water from outside the region. Despite a growing awareness of this problem, imports have actually gone up over the past eight years, from a low of 83.5 percent in 1999-2000.
Moreover, San Diego is facing a water supply “perfect storm” that threatens the region’s nearly 3 million residents. San Diego’s main source of water — the Colorado River — is drying up; a recent legal decision to protect an endangered fish in Northern California will result in less water coming to the city from the San Joaquin Delta, its second leading source; the San Diego region is in a near-historic drought that has reduced even the little local water the region usually relies on; and increasing population in the southwest is adding demand for water at the same time supplies are rapidly diminishing.
So, what is being done to address this looming crisis? While San Diego Coastkeeper and other environmental groups have successfully pushed for some local reforms, the answer to this question at this point is, sadly, not nearly enough.
The primary strategy to protect our local water supply must be conservation, which is the most effective, cost-efficient and eco-friendly way to enhance local water supplies. While strides have been made in the region over the past 15 years, water conservation is still more “buzzword” than a regional priority. The City of San Diego’s per-household water usage of 173 gallons per day is higher than most other cities in California, such as Los Angeles (141 gallons/day), Long Beach (121 gallons/day) and Santa Barbara (121 gallons/day).
Despite these disconcerting numbers, no city in the region is willing to implement serious conservation measures, and most are wary of even discussing the idea of mandatory conservation. Despite repeated efforts to push cities in the region to expand conservation efforts, water usage actually went up in 2007 to its highest levels in five years, even after the City of San Diego launched its 20-gallon-challenge, an under-funded education effort aimed at having locals voluntarily reduce water usage by 20 gallons per household per day. Nearly 70 percent of residential water use in San Diego County is for irrigation of landscapes, not for sanitation or consumption, further demonstrating that our higher water usage is more choice than necessity.
That said, too many people live in San Diego to be supported by our local water supplies, regardless of how successful conservation efforts are. Conservation, however necessary, is not sufficient to create the extra water that we need in the region.
Coastkeeper has had more success advocating for water recycling — specifically, taking wastewater that would be discharged into the ocean through the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Facility, and treating it to drinking water standards before it is used to recharge our local reservoirs.
In 2005, in response to a legal settlement between the city and a coalition of environmental groups led by San Diego Coastkeeper, San Diego prepared a Water Reuse Study that examined various water recycling options for the region. The option, supported by Coastkeeper, the Surfrider Foundation and Sierra Club, would provide a mix of potable and non-potable uses, including using up to 16 million gallons per day of advanced treated water from the city’s North City reclamation facility to augment the San Vicente Reservoir.
In 2007, the San Diego City Council voted to move ahead with a pilot project to assess the viability of this mixed-use strategy, even overriding a mayoral veto for the first time ever under a new “Strong Mayor’” form of government. The treated wastewater program will help reduce San Diego’s reliance on imported drinking water, safeguard San Diego’s water future and decrease sewage discharges to the ocean.
Often derided by opponents who have dubbed the project “toilet to tap,” Coastkeeper has supported indirect potable reuse, which meets stringent federal and state drinking water standards.
In addition to moving ahead with the pilot project to assess technological feasibility, the city is also moving ahead with a large-scale community outreach effort to make San Diegans aware that they safely drink “toilet to tap” presently — as 400 million gallons of treated sewage is discharged into the Colorado River before it is treated and becomes drinking water for the region — and that similar potable reuse projects are underway in numerous locales including Virginia, Texas and Arizona; internationally in places like Singapore; and even in San Diego’s neighbors to the north, Orange County.
The other water supply option gaining support in the San Diego region is desalination — taking the salt out of ocean water so it can be used as a drinking water source. At this point, though, Coastkeeper and other environmental groups have challenged local desalination projects due to their impacts on the marine environment as well as the carbon footprint of such facilities.
Specifically, Poseidon Resources has proposed building a 50-million-gallon-per-day desalination facility in the City of Carlsbad in northern San Diego County, which uses an astounding 217 gallons of water per household per day. The Poseidon project has drawn broad criticism from the environmental community and fishing organizations for its plans to use an outdated and destructive technology to intake 300 million gallons a day of water from the sensitive Agua Hedionda lagoon. Poseidon plans to use the existing intake infrastructure from the Encina Power Station, which plans to halt its use of ocean water to cool the power plant in response to the Riverkeeper II decision, to convert lagoon water into drinking water.
Coastkeeper and other environmental leaders have also decried the facility’s potential impact on climate change. Currently, 19 percent of all energy usage in California goes towards transporting water throughout the state and to customers. It is, therefore, critical for places like San Diego to develop local water supplies in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, ocean desalination is the only water supply option that actually uses more energy than water transfers — 47 percent more energy than transporting water from the San Joaquin Delta.
In the face of tremendous political pressure and overwhelming financial resources, Coastkeeper, Surfrider and their environmental partners have gotten three separate agencies — the California Coastal Commission, California State Lands Commission and San Diego Regional Water Board — to acknowledge the projects shortcomings and begin to put in place requirements that the facility minimize and mitigate its marine and climate impacts. While desalination may play a crucial role in helping to solve San Diego’s water crisis, such projects must be undertaken using the most environmentally and energy-friendly technologies to ensure we do not exacerbate other environmental concerns as we address our water shortages.
San Diego, like most cities in the Southwest, has grown far too large for it local water supplies. The impacts of this growth are felt far beyond these cities, though, as water transfers have had devastating impacts on the Colorado River and San Joaquin Delta, and have even contributed to our climate change problem. Creative solutions that will not force us to trade water security for energy and environmental insecurity are needed now to address this problem while there is still time. w
San Diego Coastkeeper. A low impact development roof garden from San Diego City College.