A $46.7 million water recycling project will help ease South L.A.'s drought and pollution problems

“If you can’t bring water to Los Angeles, you bring Los Angeles to the water.”

--Chinatown, 1974

As Southern California endures yet another year of drought, the Army Corps of Engineers has launched an ambitious and useful project to recycle water for 10 cities in the South Bay.

Employing a 30-mile-long latticework of underground pipelines connected to a network of pumping stations, storage reservoirs and treatment plants, the $46.7 million project will ensure that a broad cross-section of community educational and recreational services will get enough water. Numerous industrial and corporate customers will also receive the recycled wastewater after it is treated at the Hyperion Treatment Plant in El Segundo.

Representatives from the Corps and the West Basin Municipal Water District, the Corps’ local sponsor, elected officials and others will attend a formal signing ceremony Aug. 29 memorializing their teamwork on the project. West Basin’s goal by 2020 is to replace half the water now imported by the district with recycled water

From the Victoria Regional Golf Course in Carson, under the fields of Cal State Dominguez Hill’s new National Training Center to the Charles Wilson Community Park in Torrance, the project’s infrastructure will furnish recycled water through miles of subterranean pipelines, called laterals, ranging in diameter from 12 to 42 inches.. Recycled water—which, among other things, will be used to irrigate public golf courses, grassy traffic medians and a marsh and wildlife habitat—frees up valuable supplies of drinkable water.

Other customers for the recycled water will include the ARCO, Chevron and Mobil refineries, the Wilmington/L.A. industrial area, Palos Verdes Peninsula and the LAX/Westside area in Los Angeles County.

The project is the most recent local example of the Corps’ nationally proclaimed shift in its priorities from megabuilder to environmental restorer. Since the beginning of the year, Lt. Gen. Robert Flowers, the Corps’ commander, has repeatedly emphasized the agency’s commitment to a new set of environmental operating principles. For example, some 20% of the Corps’ civil works budget is now devoted to environmental programs. And in testimony in June before a Senate hearing, Gen. Flowers said the Corps “must continue to seek a balance between environmental sustainability and development.”

One segment of the Harbor/South Bay Water Recycling Project includes the Madrona Marsh Lateral Pipeline in Torrance, which will serve an existing site at the marsh. The Corps will thus contribute to a restoration project there designed to restore wildlife habitat and keep out polluted runoff.

Eventually, the project’s transmission capillaries will be connected with those of the existing West Basin Water Recycling Project, which already offers alternate water resources to some 833,000 people in 17 southwest L.A. cities and unincorporated areas. Together, they will provide a more reliable and drought-proof water supply for the Los Angeles area and also directly reduce the amount of effluent discharged into Santa Monica Bay.

The pipeline extensions for Carson customers—Victoria Golf Course and Regional Park, traffic planners and Cal State Dominguez Hill’s campus and under-construction training center—will meet an estimated total annual recycled water demand of 786 acre feet. (An acre foot is the volume of water that would cover one acre to a depth of one foot, equal to 43,560 cubic feet.) By 2020, the overall West Basin recycling program is expected develop up to 70,000 acre feet of alternative water supplies a year. When finished, the current project will deliver about 48,000 acre feet of recycled waste water.

Cities benefiting from the project include Los Angeles, Carson, Torrance, Inglewood, Hawthorne, Rolling Hills, Rancho Palos Verdes, Redondo Beach, Gardena, Palos Verdes, and Compton. The Corps, which will provide 75% of the project’s funding, is working closely with the West Basin Municipal Water District, which will furnish the remaining 25%.

Design and construction through various Corps-approved contractors is expected to take six to seven months for each lateral pipeline. The main construction will consist of a series of 12 laterals and extensions of existing mainstream pipelines. Completion of the project is estimated in fiscal year 2005.

The Corps’ project’s timing is timely. Southern California in general and Los Angeles in particular are withering under ever-drier conditions. Los Angeles, for instance, usually gets about 15 inches of rain from July to June, but received just over four inches in the latest annual precipitation period. The result has been wildfires, economic cutbacks and calls for water conservation.

Famed California historian Carey McWilliams wrote in 1946: “God has never intended Southern California to be anything but desert—Man has made it what it is.”

Now, thanks to the Corps and its local partners, Man will get some help.