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Turning Los Angeles wastewater to tap water; Politics killed a 1990s plan to recycle, but drought, technology and Orange County’s success offer hope

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on June 7, 2008 at 7:41 am

From the Los Angeles Times:

In a conference room atop a downtown Los Angeles tower, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s point man on water conservation was confidently ticking off the protections built into a plan to recycle highly treated sewage effluent into the drinking supply.

But when his staff explained that community meetings on the project might not begin until early next year, H. David Nahai quickly grew uneasy. That’s too slow, too risky, the Department of Water and Power general manager told his team. “Folks on the street who’ll hear about wastewater treatment [may] have some reticence about it. . . . The more this languishes, the more the fires of suspicion are going to get fanned. We need to go out quicker.”

The recent session captured the larger political dynamics of Villaraigosa’s ambitious new effort to wean Los Angeles from its increasingly precarious dependence on distant water supplies. With a statewide drought, a broad spectrum of early political support and new purification technologies, administration officials think they are well positioned to begin a years-long transition to wastewater recycling for household use.

But a long shadow is still being cast by the multimillion-dollar collapse of a similar effort eight years ago, when water recycling was dubbed “toilet to tap” and the issue became mired in a mayoral campaign and the San Fernando Valley secession effort.

Read the full text of this article from the Los Angeles Times by clicking here.

June 7, 2008 · Filed Under Recycled Water

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