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The state water board approved a major policy change this month agreeing to allow heavily treated effluent to be mixed directly with potable water supplies.
There’s certainly the ick factor in this discussion, but in an arid state with droughts always possible, utilizing water resources wisely is paramount. And, it’s not a new concept.
Two realities:
Think of all of the cities north of Tracy/Manteca that discharge treated sewage into the Delta—Stockton, Elk Grove, Sacramento. I’ve seen estimates that in low water years as much as 10% of the flow that feeds into the huge pumps has been treated and released into the Delta. For Zone 7 water users, the Delta provides as much as 80% of water in a normal year. Reuse is typical elsewhere in the country where cities take water from rivers on the upstream side, use it, treat it and then put it back in the river. You’re not drinking pristine snow melt unless you live in an area served by the San Francico Public Utilities Commission’s Hetchy Hetchy project near Yosemite or the East Bay Municipal Utility District’s Mokelumne River supply. Both cross the Delta in large enclosed pipes.
In Orange County, the drinking water comes from wells. The public agencies refill the aquifers with treated effluent that perks into the ground. We’re doing something similar, although without the injection. When the Dublin San Ramon Services District started making recycled water available for landscape use in the purple pipes, regulators required Zone 7 to build a reserve osmosis plant (at the corner of Stoneridge Drive and Santa Rita Road) to ensure that the minerals in the recycled water do not build up in the ground water. The proposal before the water board adds another layer of treatment so there are no minerals left and allows immediate potable use.
In California, irrigated agriculture uses about 80% of the water. Depending upon what’s growing, it is worthwhile to pump ground water for trees and some vines. Not so for row crops. The cost and availability of water is why there’s very little cotton grown now in California when there were hundreds of acres 20 years ago. That’s been replaced by almonds, a leading export.
Two major water supply projects also should be mentioned. The long-awaited Sites Reservoir near Corning in Northern California is slowly moving ahead. It is an off-stream facility like the San Luis Reservoir in Los Banos designed to take water during high flows and then release it when needed in the fall.
The other controversial project also moving ahead with an approved environmental impact report is the Delta tunnel that would take Sacramento River water at high flows and deliver it directly to the pump forebays near Tracy. It’s important to note that the State Water Project always was planned with a Delta diversion instead of forcing rivers to flow north-south instead of the natural east-west direction. The key metric about the huge pumps is how many cubic feet per second the San Joaquin River is flowing backward toward the pumps.
These state water wars, between powerful interests, have raged since the 1970s and Jerry Brown’s first stint as governor. He couldn’t move it forward with a second eight-year shot. The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein worked on it at the federal level.
Legal actions already have been filed so nothing will happen while it wends its way through the courts.
I read the obituary for Chris Kinzel, a long-time valley resident and probably its best-known traffic engineer this week. He worked 49 years for TJKM Transportation Consultants, a company he co-founded in 1974. When it came to transportation planning in the valley, Kinzel was the No. 1 resource.
The obituary listed some of the projects he helped plan: Pleasanton’s Hacienda Business Park (the largest single park in Northern California), East Dublin, the Tracy Hills community (a 7,000-acre project spanning Interstate 580 west of Tracy, the Mountain House community (4,800 acres north of I-205), and Lathrop’s River Islands community (almost 5,000 acres). His fingerprints were all over every huge project with the exception of the Dougherty Valley.
What’s more is he was a devout Christian of the highest integrity, polite to a fault with a great dry sense of humor.
Pleasanton already has shitty water, now we will even have more shit in our water. We get these things because people do not do their homework before voting!
Effluent water is fine providing one has the antibodies to neutralize the inherent bacteria and and disease-carrying parasites.
In India as well as Mexico, water is water and the source(s) are immaterial providing one uses common sense.
According to WHO and UNICEF, in 2020, one in four people of the global population had no access to safe drinking water. By 2030, about 19 percent of the global population will not have access to safe drinking water.
Tim, some of the work you have been involved in will have provided safe drinking water to an additional six percent of the global population in this decade. Thank you for your involvement.
@Michael Austin…how will increasing safe drinking water in California directly benefit those in other parts of the world (i.e. Africa and India)?
If you are referring to the technology of recycling contaminated water, who is going to implement and pay for all of the water treatment facilities in various 3rd world countries?
It is certainly not the responsibility of American taxpayers.
There are multiple organizations, some of which Tim is involved with that voluntarily travel to those third-world countries, help sink wells for drinking water, and how to purify the water if necessary.
I was not referring to California, although it is common knowledge, that California water is not safe for drinking without filtering.
@Michael Austin…thanks for the clarification.
Curious…once wells are established in the more backwards countries, what is the purification process? Will it involve boiling the water or halazone treatment?
Wouldn’t it be simpler to simply disperse water purification tablets to the natives once the water is drawn?
Halazone tablets are frequently carried by those in the field (i.e. military and Boy Scouts) and though halazone alters the taste of water, it is a highly effective bacterial disinfectant.
Building wastewater treatment plants in 3rd world countries is a considerable expense and it is highly unlikely that these underdeveloped countries have the technical and intellectual capacities to maintain these facilities due to their high illiteracy rates and lack of basic public health protocols.
If this wasn’t the case, they would have had more potable drinking water a long time ago.
Anyone who has travelled to Mexico knows not to drink the local water because of ‘Montezuma’s Revenge’ which is a form of dissentary.
Drinking Mexican beer or bottled water from the USA alleviates the problem.
@Monty Lange:
It was and is the responsibility of the Western European colonizers to provide safe drinking water for all of the indigenous cultures that they exploited in a never-ending quest for readily- available natural resources and cheap human labor.
Colonizer mining, logging, agriculture, and animal husbandry ventures have contributed to the polluted rivers and streams in many underdeveloped countries.
And the white colonizers must be held accountable for their misdeeds.
In early 90’s I went looking for bottled water in Beijing.
The bottled water had a lot of little things in it along with sediment in the bottom of the bottle.
Locals boiled the water before drinking it. So, I drank boiled water too and survived. I lived in hotel that also housed Russian diplomats. The hotel staff provided boiling hot water to the room every evening, in a quart sized container.
@Stacy Jacobs: The Chinese consider Africa their second continent. Chine controls Africa. Take your complaints to them.
@JJ
How did China (PRC) become a colonizer of African nations?
In addition to their native tongue, are the Africans fluent in Chinese as well?
According to Michael Austin, the Chinese boil their water prior to drinking it.
Since Africa is now a colony of China (according to JJ), will the Chinese be sharing this major technological breakthrough with the Africans?
China is merely offering humanitarian assistance to impoverished African nations in exchange for limited access to their natural resources.
To date, the PRC has provided over $60B in foreign aid to various nations in Africa because unlike the United States and Western Europe, China views Africa as a global partner rather than a former source of human slavery and exploitation.
African countries are not inclined to be democracies, which is why America and other Western countries shy away.
China’s investment in African countries is not humanitarian. China’s investment is in infrastructure and that investment is in the form of loans.
There are 10,000 Chinese businesses in African countries. Those businesses are saturated with the influx of Chinese workers, resulting in local high unemployment numbers.
Some African countries have now defaulted on those Chinses loans. China is removing massive natural resources to “cover” the loans.
Guy Scott, the former agricultural minister in the Zambian government told the Guardian, “we’ve had bad people before. The whites were bad, the Indians were worse, but the Chinese are worst of all. Is this the same humanitarian assistance they give to Uyghurs
Can we safely assume that the majority of African nations are incapable of maintaining true democracies along with managing their own economies and natural resources?
If so, it is no wonder that they were first colonized by the white Europeans and later exploited by the East Indians and Chinese.
Cancel culture and wokeness aside, perhaps they are truly incapable of responsible self-government outside of tribal protocols and practices.
The Chinese are saavy investors which explains their global monetary success.
And it is not limited to African nations. China also assisted in the financing of the Iraq/Afghanistan war by purchasing U.S. Treasury bonds because there were inadequate fiscal resources in President George W. Bush’s war budget.
Now the Chinese are collecting massive amounts of accrued interest as there is absolutely no way that our country can reduce its debt ceiling or pay-off these bonds in full.
It should also be noted that the interest is being remunerated in GOLD (from Fort Knox, Kentucky) because the Chinese have minimal faith in U.S. currency and rightfully so.
We might as well add America alongside Africa when it comes to fiscal dependencies and in response to Michael Austin’s comment, “African countries are not inclined to democracies”, isn’t that the great ongoing debate taking place in America today?
Poor fiscal management is a gateway to China global domination and in many ways, America is no different than Africa.
“America is no different than Africa ”
Being from Johannesburg, South Africa I can attest to this comment. Some of America’s poorest inner-city neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant (NYC), Southside Chicago, Compton, Richmond and East Oakland bear a striking similarity to those in the Johannesburg ghettos.
Add the urban homelessness problem into the equation and America could probably use some additional Chinese investment dollars for improvements as well, especially since Congress can no longer agree on anything that truly matters.
Anerica is in decline because it has overextended itself with costly and highly unsuccessful military interventions abroad (Viet Nam, Iraq/Afghanistan, Ukraine etc).
Those wasted dollars could have gone towards improving the quality of life for countless American citizens but it is too late now.
America has become a colony of China because of its dependence on cheaply-manufactured Chinese goods and the increased influx of wealthy Chinese nationals moving to the United States.
Back to the water discussion…in Japan (and unlike China), the tap water there is very safe to drink and exceeds WHO standards for cleanliness. There is even a bottled water brand called Tokyo Tap.
Drinking tap water in places like India, SE Asia, China, and Mexico is taking chances.
With a population of 1.4 billion, one would think that a so-called modern industrial country like China should be able to provide safe drinking water because they have the technology to do so.
Then again, there are places in the United States like Flint, Michigan where safe, potable water is also a pipe dream.
A basic rule of thumb is that if the place looks dirty, the drinking water is probably dirty as well.