Jeffrey Kightlinger spent 15 years as Chief Executive Officer of the Metropolitan Water District, the largest municipal water provider in the nation. In this presentation for Sustainable Silicon Valley, he gives the background and history of the Metropolitan Water District and the current water policy issues facing Metropolitan, California, and the West.
Here’s what Mr. Kightlinger had to say, in his own words, lightly edited for clarity.
SoCal’s water past: The history of Metropolitan Water District
Metropolitan Water District is a Los Angeles-based organization that came from Los Angeles’ growth at the turn of the century. William Mulholland, the head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at the time, famously built the Los Angeles Aqueduct up to the Owens Valley. It was similar to and in the same timeframe as the Hetch Hetchy system in San Francisco; both tap into waters east and are gravity flow systems, the type of systems they could build in the 1900s. The Owens Valley supply brings water about 200 miles from the Owens Valley to the city of Los Angeles; it came online in 1913.
At that time, William Mulholland thought they’d supplied 50 years of water to Los Angeles and were well ahead of all the growth. But, a huge growth boom started in Los Angeles around the mid-1900s based on oil and later the beginning of the film industry. As early as the 1920s, it became clear to Mulholland that more water would be needed other than just the Owens Valley supply. He began looking around, and with the technology they had at the time, the closest, most significant supply of water they could find was the Colorado River, roughly about 250 miles east of Southern California.
The Colorado River Aqueduct
Mulholland went into his city attorney’s office and said, ‘I’m going to need about $200-220 million to build an aqueduct to the Colorado River.’ The attorney looked at the bonding capacity of the city of LA at the time and determined that even though it was the largest city in southern California, they couldn’t bond it; there wasn’t enough capacity in property value to issue bonds to build it.
So the city attorney came up with an idea: Why don’t we bring in the suburbs and cities? If we bring them in and form a coalition, we can afford it. And it makes more sense because Los Angeles had its Owens Valley supply, and Mulholland was looking 20 years ahead and didn’t need Colorado River water at that time in the 1920s.
So it took a few years, but the Legislature created the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. It was a coalition of 13 cities in Southern California: Los Angeles, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, and a couple of cities in Orange County. They bonded together to pool their costs to build the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Quite a bit of logistical governmental work had to take place. First, the California legislature had to create Metropolitan Water District. Next, they had to go to the other states and divide the Colorado River waters; that took almost a decade of wrangling and negotiating the divide between them that was overseen by Herbert Hoover. Then they had to go to Congress and get permission to build a dam on the Colorado River; now we know it as Hoover Dam, but at the time, it was the Boulder Canyon Dam. They also had to go to Congress and build another dam, Parker Dam, and return to Congress to get the permits to build the Colorado River Aqueduct. All of that took about ten years of working in the state and the federal Legislature, obtaining the land, and putting it all together. Then, when they were finally ready to finance it in the early 1930s, it was the middle of the Great Depression, and Southern California had about a 40% unemployment rate.
It would take about ten years to build this project. It would be the most expensive project ever built in the United States or the world at the time. And it would be financed entirely by debt issuance in Southern California because the state and federal government said, ‘We’re broke; it’s the depression.’ So basically, they were asking people to put a property tax lien on themselves for ten years before there was a drop of water to sell in the middle of the Great Depression with 40% unemployment. It would be 17% of the entire value of Southern California pledged to a single project.
They saw it as a tough lift, so they put out a lot of propaganda about thirst, growth, and living in a desert. And it passed overwhelmingly; it was about a twelve to one margin that people voted for it, which I always think was quite remarkable. It shows you the spirit of people; they knew things would get better and were confident they and the state would come through the Great Depression and thrive.
By 1940, the Colorado River Project was built and was delivering water. Shortly after it came online, there was a huge post-World War II boom, and Southern California started growing remarkably. The Colorado River water was fully subscribed. The Colorado River Aqueduct was delivering water to Southern California. With all the growth, other parts of southern California started to join Metropolitan and annex to it.
So slowly but surely, Metropolitan grew to be the entirety of Southern California, what we call the urban coastal plain. It’s all of Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego County, the southern part of Ventura County, and then the eastern parts of Riverside and San Bernardino, where the population centers are in those counties.
In terms of landmass, it’s about 1/20 of the state of California, but in terms of population, one in every two Californians lives in the area that Metropolitan serves. Another way is one in every 16 Americans lives in Southern California and is served water by Metropolitan.
So, as Southern California grew in the 1940s with the postwar boom, we were confident that we had taken care of the next 50 years with Colorado River water. But by the early 1950s, we had started ripping out all the citrus trees in Orange County and replacing them with homes, and it became clear that another source of water was going to be needed.
State Water Project
The Orange County-San Diego-Inland Empire area was predominantly agricultural but was growing into homes and suburbs. Los Angeles represented the old guard, and Los Angeles said, ‘We don’t want to grow more; we’re satisfied with where our water supply’ because they were reaching close to being built out. And they already had paid for much of the Colorado River and their own Owens Valley Aqueduct.
However, the growing areas in the southern part of Southern California, Orange, and San Diego County pushed and clamored for a new water supply. After much debate and wrangling with the state of California and then-governor Pat Brown, Metropolitan over Los Angeles protests eventually decided to bankroll the State Water Project.
The State Water Project was Governor Pat Brown’s plan to move water from the northern Sierra to the Central Valley for farming and to Southern California. And to make it work, he knew he needed Metropolitan’s support. So Pat Brown did a lot of twisting arms in Los Angeles, and eventually, after four failed votes, Metropolitan voted to go ahead and finance the State Water Project.
It was a remarkable commitment. At the time, many of the civic leaders were skeptical. It was, again, going to be the most expensive civil works project ever built in the world. It was massive – it would be some 300 miles of aqueducts and canals, dams in Northern California, and the largest pump station ever built to lift the water over the Tehachapi Mountains into Southern California. It was really going to stress all our technical and engineering capacities at the time; it was going to be incredibly cutting-edge and very expensive, so it was a rather breathtaking commitment.
What the contract called for was that Metropolitan would pay half the cost of the State Water Project as a fixed-cost debt for 75 years. The contract was signed in 1960 and runs through 2035. In our industry, it’s what we call a ‘take or pay contract’ (which I never quite understood the “or” because you pay regardless), which is really you pay, and you get whatever the project serves. In some years, the project serves up a lot of water because there’s a lot of rain and snow, and you get a lot of water for your money. In drought years, the project serves up hardly any water, and it doesn’t matter; you still pay the cost.
What costs are for water – we don’t pay for water; we pay for infrastructure and the cost of moving water, which is the electricity to move it, which is fairly small. So, the cost of the State Water Project is pretty static. It costs about the same in a drought year, minus the electricity, as it costs in a wet year. So, regardless of how much water you get, your bill is pretty much the same. To give you a sense of the size of the bill, Metropolitan will be paying about $550-$560 million this year. Over half a billion dollars a year as a single check to the state of California to finance half the cost of the State Water Project, and for that, Metropolitan gets half the water the project delivers.
The State Water Project was originally designed to deliver 4 million acre-feet per year on average, though it was originally intended to have several more dams. The State Water Project dams up the water on the Feather River at Lake Oroville. Then the water that’s captured there gets released down the Feather River to the Sacramento River, makes its way through the San Francisco Bay-Delta, and at the southern end of the Delta, the pumping plant lifts the water into the California Aqueduct that parallels I-5 and brings water to Central Valley farms and then to Southern California.
The project was supposed to include dams on the Eel River and elsewhere to provide more water, but those were never built as they ran out of money. The project was also supposed to include a bypass canal system that went around the Delta, which was never built because the project ran out of money. Still, when you look at its sheer scope and size, it’s pretty amazing.
One of the remarkable things is in California, we can take a drop of water from the very northern part of the state, even north of Lake Oroville up in Lake Shasta, where there’s a federal project dam that delivers water primarily to the San Joaquin Valley and Sacramento Valleys, and we can deliver it to Chula Vista on the Mexico border through our plumbing system. There are a lot of environmental impacts and a lot of energy associated with that. Still, it is a marvel of the world, and most people in most parts of the world who run a water system are pretty jealous that we have managed to build a system that can support this. Absent this kind of plumbing and hardware system, you don’t have a Southern California of 38 million people and the fifth largest economy in the world. That would simply not be possible absent the kind of infrastructure that we built to support it.
The State Water Project went to the voters for statewide bonds in 1968, and it barely passed. Then-Governor Pat Brown made a barnstorming effort, and Southern California’s votes were enough. There is opposition in Northern California, but it’s not incredibly strident. It barely passes, 51-49 statewide. The State Water Project was built and began delivering water a decade later, in 1971. That became the last major water system built in the state of California.
1990 drought
In 1990, Metropolitan suffered its first severe drought. For the first time, Metropolitan had to ration water. We have had severe droughts in the state before; in the late 70s, when Governor Jerry Brown was governor for the first time, we had a terrible drought. In fact, it was hydrologically considered one of the worst droughts ever in about 2000 years of tree ring history. That drought was incredibly severe.
People might recall Marin County ran out of water, and they had to strap a pipe across the Richmond Bridge and bring water into Marin County. The source of the water that went to Marin was from Metropolitan. What Metropolitan did was ramp up pumping on the Colorado River at the request of Jerry Brown; they forsook their State Water Project water, gave it back to the state, the state supplied it to Marin County, and bailed them out of the drought. Metropolitan could do that because it had this diverse mix of supplies: groundwater basins, local supplies, and the Colorado River Aqueduct. So Metropolitan pumped heavily and ran the Colorado River Aqueduct at about 110% of capacity to get through the 70s drought with no real impact on Metropolitan and an ability to help other parts of the state.
But by 1990, that didn’t happen. Northern California went into another drought, and Metropolitan, for the first time, had to ration water. With hindsight, you can see what happened. In 1900, Southern California ran out of water and built the Owens Valley Aqueduct. In 1930, Metropolitan ran out of water and built the Colorado River aqueduct. In 1960, Metropolitan started to run out of water and built the State Water Project. And then, in 1990, Metropolitan ran out of water and had to ration.
The answer had always been to just tap into another supply. The difference was that it was a very different world in 1990 than in 1960, 1930, and 1900. Those engineering solutions were harder and more expensive, but politically, the world had changed. We passed a slew of environmental laws in the 1970s. We passed the California Environmental Quality Act, the National Environmental Policy Act at the federal level, and the Endangered Species Act.
SoCal’s water present: Metropolitan as the regional water planning agency
Those massive infrastructure replumbing of the West projects have become more or less a thing of the past, but in the 1990s, that didn’t mean our engineers didn’t have ideas. We have looked at how to reroute the Klamath River. We’ve looked at rerouting the Columbia River and moving it down the Rockies with the help of several nuclear power pumping plants. We’d have looked at relocating water from the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Great Lakes, but the era of massive infrastructure rerouting and replumbing more or less had ended.
So, Metropolitan had to rethink how to continue to grow and supply enough water. Metropolitan did some things in the 1990s that were unique, but they’re now pretty much universal in managing water. In the beginning, Metropolitan was the supplemental water provider to the cities of Southern California. But now, what we said was, ‘We’re going to be the water planning agency for all of Southern California; we’re not just going to pick up water from far away and sell it to you and be done with our job; we’re actually going to look at how we plan as a region.’
At the time, there was a fair amount of discussion about whether that really was an appropriate governmental role for Metropolitan. Were cities giving up power to Metropolitan to do that? It took about four years of debate before it was decided this was the path we would take.
Metropolitan developed its first Integrated Resource Plan in the mid-1990s, and we’ve been updating it every five years since then. We look 25 years ahead, consider demand and growth projections, and then at water conditions and supply. We also consider what each city has, not just what Metropolitan will get from the Colorado River or Northern California. What is the local supply? What do the groundwater conditions look like? What is rainfall in Southern California? How can we best utilize the recycled water opportunities there?
Metropolitan also would collect money. For the first time, we started assessing a water stewardship fee. The idea was that it was really a public benefit charge. So, on every acre-foot of water Metropolitan would sell, we’d add a fee. And that fee would be used to fund conservation, water recycling, and other types of local projects.
Metropolitan also standardized conservation efforts. Prior to that, of course, we had conservation efforts throughout Southern California, but every city did it themselves. So Los Angeles might give you a rebate on a low-flush toilet, Orange County might not, and San Diego might offer the same or a different rebate. It was all scattered and ad hoc throughout Southern California. In the Metropolitan service area, there are almost 300 cities, ranging from large ones like Los Angeles and San Diego to small ones – Chula Vista or La Canada, some down to about 20,000 residents, and every single one would set its own water conservation program.
Metropolitan set out to make that uniform throughout Southern California, collect the money in one place, and then redistribute it as a rebate. So if you walked into a Home Depot or Lowe’s, and it didn’t matter what city in Southern California, they would offer the same rebate on toilets, for example. It made conservation more effective, uniform, and stronger throughout Southern California.
That effort took a lot of planning and work to institutionalize the role of shifting from just being an imported water provider to the whole water manager for Southern California. And that’s led us to the present day.
It’s been remarkably effective in its own way. In 1990, Southern California had 14 million people, and Metropolitan sold 2.4 million acre-feet. … We estimate an acre-foot now serves about three average households for a year for their water supply. So we would sell 2.4 million acre-feet in 1990 to satisfy the demands of 12 million people. Today, Metropolitan serves 90 million people and sells about 1.6 million acre-feet. So we’ve cut the amount of water by a third, and at the same time, we’ve grown in population by 25-30%. So we’ve been able to add a lot of people and actually reduce the amount of water.
That’s been critical to getting through this. Otherwise, we would have had to build that fourth aqueduct to some faraway place to get that water. Instead, we’ve been able to do that with demand management, conservation, and the funding of recycled water projects throughout Southern California.
SoCal’s water present: Building up storage capabilities
That gets me to the last topic: The model we have in Southern California of a regional water provider and what its stresses are now. We’ve managed to do well in terms of managing growth and population. But right now, we’re trying to manage through what climate change is happening and doing to our system.
The good news for Metropolitan has always been that it has always been very strong in dealing with droughts because of the diversity of supply. Metropolitan gets about half its water locally, which is rainfall that feeds the Los Angeles River. That local rainfall – 12-14” of rain in the LA area, 6-7” in San Diego – feeds some pretty big groundwater basins in Orange County, the San Gabriel Valley, and the San Fernando Valley. These groundwater basins can provide a significant amount of water; almost 35-40% of Southern California’s water comes from groundwater.
The other main sources are the Colorado River from the Rockies and the State Water Project from the Sierra Mountains. So, three hydrologically distinct watersheds provide the Metropolitan’s water supply. So when the Colorado River and the Rockies would go in drought, or the Sierra would go into drought, you’d still have water in usually two of the three. So, that diversity of supply really helped protect Metropolitan against drought. But by the 1990s, we found that wasn’t enough with our population.
So, Metropolitan began doing two big things in the 1990s. First was the conservation effort.
The second was building storage. One of the lessons we learned was that our hydrology was becoming even more volatile; that was one of the impacts we started tracking of climate change in the early 2000s.
People may not realize this, but California has, by far and away, the most variable hydrology in the United States. In the southwest, it’s mostly dry. It’s more or less wet in the north and northeast, but their hydrology falls within a fairly narrow range. Our hydrology ranges from extremely wet to extremely dry in California, and our range is far greater than anywhere in the nation.
That’s good in many respects. Because of that high variability, we have the most diverse biodiversity in our natural systems in California. But as a utility manager, we’re trying to deliver water 24/7, 365, and we like nice and steady. That makes it easy to plan. But we don’t have that. Climate change has exacerbated that even more. So we started looking at how to manage with that high variability, and one of the things you do in the water business is build storage.
In the 1990s, Metropolitan could only store about a quarter million acre-feet, or 1/10 of our whole demand, in reservoirs at any time. By the time I left in 2021, Metropolitan could store up to 5 million acre-feet or two full years of demand all the time in reservoirs and groundwater basins. About half of that storage is above ground in reservoirs and about half in groundwater basins.
It was a massive, expensive effort by Metropolitan beginning in 1990. We spent over $2 billion building Diamond Valley Lake Reservoir, the largest reservoir in Southern California. We spent another billion dollars on groundwater basins, wells, and spreading basins in the system and another billion dollars for our inland feeder pipeline to feed them all. Building a vast storage network across Southern California was roughly a $4 billion effort over 25 years from the mid-1990s to 2020. And that has helped harden and make our area a lot more resilient to drought.
While I was General Manager from 2005 to 2020, we had two of the driest stretches of weather in California’s recorded history. You have to go back 1800 years, based on tree rings, to find anything comparable to the drought we had. In the 2012-2015 period, we had another extreme drought. In the last 15 years, three governors have declared statewide drought emergencies. Eight of the last 15 years have been drought emergency years. And we haven’t had real dramatic rationing; we haven’t had the shock effects like Australia had when they had similar conditions. Part of that is that we’ve been preparing for this.
When we have these wet years, Metropolitan has built the system to rapidly capture all that water and move it into reservoirs and groundwater basins. So even having gone through this last 15-year period with about half of those years being drought, we still move into the next decade with more water in storage in Metropolitan history than we’ve ever had before. When we have these occasional wet years, we can move all that water, and that has worked well in preparing us to deal with the climate-changed world.
SoCal’s water future: Growing challenges for imported water
But still, there are significant challenges we see coming. By most projections, the Colorado River has lost about 30% of its historic supply to climate change. Shrinking snowpack, early spring, hotter weather – all those things have resulted in less and less water reaching the Colorado River to the point where the states are now using more water than is coming in. And we’ve been living off our stored water in Lake Mead and Lake Powell for the last 15 years. Obviously, that’s not sustainable.
We have the guidelines governing the river, and we negotiate and adapt those every couple of decades. The last time we did that was in 2007. The current guidelines expire in 2026. Most experts agree that to be sustainable, we will have to reduce the consumption on the Colorado River by 1.5 million acre-feet every year. That will have to be shared with the Lower Basin states of Arizona, Nevada, California, and the country of Mexico. That is a considerable reduction.
When we talk about a million and a half acre-feet, that’s almost all of Southern California’s water supply for 19 million people. That’s the amount we’ll have to somehow find a way to reduce the usage in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico. So you can imagine that’s an incredible, politically tough, fraught negotiation. But we also know it has to happen because the current situation cannot be sustained. And the federal government has said, ‘You have to get this done by 2026, or the Secretary of Interior will do it for you.’ The last thing we want is to have a dictate of how to share it.
So we want to try to solve this ourselves. We’ve been in state-to-state negotiations; we’re talking with the tribes, environmental groups, and the sovereign country of Mexico. So you can imagine this is a tough, long, protracted geopolitical negotiation taking place. But we have to be successful at it. We’re on a good path and have a good track record of negotiating these issues amongst the states. Legal historians are well aware of the Supreme Court challenges and battles between Arizona and California in the 1960s. We don’t want to go back before the US Supreme Court and state-to-state battles.
Our goal as water managers is to solve this, but it will be the toughest negotiation we’ve ever had. And we are right in the middle of it. Our goal is to come up with at least a framework agreement between Arizona, California, and Nevada by March. We’ve been working on it for a couple of years. We still have a long way to go. But I am optimistic we’re going to get there.
In Northern California, we haven’t seen the same reduction in water supply year in and year out that we’ve seen on the Colorado River. But what we have seen in the Sierras is a much more diminished snowpack and much more volatility, which puts a lot of stress on our infrastructure. We get these wet years, and our levee system in the Bay Delta is stressed by these big atmospheric rivers coming through.
We’re seeing a diminished snowpack, and we still get a lot of water, but it’s coming as rain more often than snow. We have 130-140 years of recorded history in California, and of the top of the ten worst snowpacks we’ve ever seen, seven have been in the last 15 years. So climate change is shrinking our snowpack.
The reason that’s important is that we built our system to rely on slow-melting snow that takes four or five months to melt from the Sierras that we can capture and move around the state. Now, if that same precipitation is coming in, but instead of having four or five months to manage it, we only have 14-15 days to manage it in storms. Our systems weren’t designed for that.
We’ve been talking about building more robust systems to capture and move water when it’s coming in as rain, and the most recent idea of the last decade has been building some tunnels under the Delta and moving water into the state system. That has been incredibly contentious in Northern California; there’s a lot of opposition to it.
Governor Schwarzenegger started the concept, Governor Brown had a two-tunnel proposal, and Governor Newsom shrunk it to a one-tunnel proposal. It’s still in the proposal stage. The environmental review documents have recently been completed on a single tunnel, but there still is incredible political opposition. There are many financing challenges to it; it won’t be a cheap project – $15-20 billion, maybe more. So we’re going to have to figure out how to pay for it and how to get enough political support to do it.
Water has always been a political challenge; there’s always been a north-south divide about how to manage water. However, as a state, if we’re going to be reliable and deal with 38 40 million people, we have to find some way to resolve these issues and move forward. Even when we did it in 1960 with the State Water Project, that was by a 1% vote. It hasn’t gotten any easier over the last 50-60 years.
A real hopeful sign is Metropolitan is also looking at building Pure Water SoCal. It would be the largest water recycling facility in Southern California and the nation at 150 million gallons per day. The idea of building it would be to take all the water replenishment for all the major groundwater basins in Southern California, move it into recycled water, and save our imported water for drought, management, and climate change issues. That will be an incredibly expensive project, a multi-billion dollar facility. It will supply a lot of water that we don’t necessarily need at this point in time, but perhaps 30-40 years from now. But if we don’t start it now, it’s hard to finish it 30-40 years from now.
One of our far-reaching ideas was to cost-share this with Nevada and Arizona; they would pay up to 25% or so of the project, and 25% of the water would be returned to them by exchange for Metropolitan’s Colorado River supplies. It’s a way of artificially augmenting the flow of the Colorado River to make up for some of that lost water. And it’s a way of partnering among the big urban centers of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix and finding a way in which those urban entities can find ways to cost share, grow recycled water, and collectively lessen our demand on a stressed resource, the Colorado River.
There are so many far-reaching ideas there, and there is a lot of interstate cooperation amongst red and blue states. I find that to be politically and technologically a very promising path. So I see a lot of opportunity there for the future and how we can think through these issues collectively as a state, but even broader as the entire Southwest region.
QUESTIONS & ANSWERS
QUESTIONS: Regarding Pure Water SoCal, Host Dennis Murphy noted that 150 MGD is a very large number, especially compared to Bay Area recycled water projects, which would produce 8 to 12 million gallons per day. He noted that for every 8 million gallons of recycled water that Valley Water produces, 1 million gallons of brine is created, and no one has quite figured out the best ways to deal with the brine.
JEFF KIGHTLINGER: There are no free rides. Recycled water is deemed a more environmentally friendly project than imported water, but it has impacts. The big impacts are that it is energy intensive and disposing of the brine byproduct. Once you’ve recycled water, the solution has mostly been to use what we call brine outfalls that put the concentrated brine in the ocean. It’s cleaned up; contaminants are removed, so it’s just purely salted compound. But we use the ocean for the disposal of that brine. And absent that, it’s really hard to recycle water, so typically, where you see the recycled water is on the coast, where you can access the ocean. You don’t see a lot of recycled water in the Phoenix, Denver, or Las Vegas area because they don’t really have an easy spot to deal with brine. When you put it on land, you end up with these brine sumps that eventually become more and more toxic over time. So we’ve used the ocean in Southern California, but it does have that trade-off and no doubt impacts.
QUESTION: You mentioned the half billion dollar payments for the State Water Project each year. Are the costs primarily related to electricity/energy costs?
JEFF KIGHTLINGER: No, about 85% of that cost is fixed. That’s the cost of Oroville Dam, the maintenance, the aqueduct systems, and the pumping plants. It’s for infrastructure. Of the overall $1 billion to maintain the State Water Project, 80-85% is just for the fixed costs of building, maintaining, and paying off the infrastructure and hardware. About 15% is what we call the marginal cost to move the water; most of that’s electricity, labor, and other costs, but that’s 10-12% of the overall cost. The bulk of the cost is the infrastructure. People always say, ‘I’m paying for water, but it rains, so it should be free.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, you just have to move it, and that’s the expensive part.’
QUESTION: Host Dennis Murphy notes that water can have different qualities, depending on where it was sourced from. In the Bay Area, water sourced from Hetch Hetchy is very clean, while groundwater can have higher pH and total dissolved solids. How does the water in Metropolitan’s system vary in different areas?
JEFF KIGHTLINGER: Metropolitan tests its water incredibly rigorously. Metropolitan has one of the largest labs in the world. And we test roughly 1000 different samples daily. About 350,000 samples a year are taken from water at various locations and measured. They are different, so Metropolitan has developed very careful blending policies and policies for managing water.
Metropolitan’s Colorado River water is very salty compared to Northern California’s water. The Colorado River water comes in at roughly 500 parts per million total dissolved solids – the salts. A lot of that is because of upstream farming. San Francisco is fortunate with its Hetch Hetchy supply. There is no use of the water upstream; it’s captured at the source and then moved straight into the system, and almost nothing needs to be done, just a little filtering. And it’s perfect for drinking.
Colorado River water has been farmed and returned to the river multiple times over its journey down the Colorado River and eventually to Metropolitan. That results in a heavy dose of salt. What Metropolitan has historically done is blend that water with State Water Project supplies coming off the Sierra and have much less impact – it’s coming in at less than half the amount of salts of the Colorado River at less than 200 parts per million. So, blending those two helps quite a bit in managing salts and total dissolved solids.
We also look at not just the water’s salt, dissolved solids, and mineral compounds but also manmade contaminants. Luckily, we see those less in the surface water. But, large parts of our area rely on their groundwater basins. We have had a lot of industrial development from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s throughout Southern California that resulted in Superfund sites and contaminants such as perchlorate, MTBE, and all sorts of contamination throughout groundwater basins. Those basins then must be treated at great expense as we have to add wellhead treatment to remove those contaminants. So we’ve lost a lot of that supply as well, just because we can’t treat it up to drinking water standards. So we look at the contamination levels and the salt issues, and we balance and try to blend our water and manage that so it’s all good drinking water.
Metropolitan made a decision around 2000 to shift our treatment process to ozone treatment instead of chlorination. It’s much safer and better health-wise as there are some known carcinogen precursors in using all the chlorination and disinfection byproducts, and ozonation results in a much better-tasting product. We have a panel of experts that taste the water from our treatment plants. It’s a real source of pride that we take in that our tap water will not only be perfectly healthy and safe but also tastes good.
The shift to ozonation was very expensive. Metropolitan operates five of the largest treatment plants in the world to deliver treated water throughout Southern California. Shifting them from chlorination to ozonation as the primary source of treatment cost about a billion dollars and took about 20 years to do but it’s resulted in a much healthier and safer product for the public.
