Officials gathered Friday, April 14, to toast the completed expansion of a pioneering recycling facility that takes wastewater and turns it into clean, drinkable water for much of Orange County.
With the $284 million expansion to the 15-year-old Groundwater Replenishment System, the facility can now provide up to 130 million gallons of water per day, enough to serve 1 million people daily in north and central Orange County.
“We really have something special right here in Orange County that we should all be proud of,” Cathy Green, the Orange County Water District’s board president, said. “Through decades of planning and proactive outreach, Orange County Water and Sanitation districts came together to implement a project that solves significant issues faced by each agency.”
There are two sources of water that residents get in Orange County: groundwater and water imported by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. Groundwater is about half the cost of imported water, according to Mike Markus, general manager of the Orange County Water District.
Into the 1990s, the OC Water District relied on rain to keep groundwater basins filled, however long droughts meant more of a reliance on the purchase of imported water to meet needs, prompting the department to look for alternative ways to fill the basins.
The two agencies pioneered a recycling system to turn wastewater into clean, drinkable water.
“We built the first phase that went online in January 2008, providing 70 million gallons of water per day,” Markus said. “Since then, we’ve expanded it even further. We built an additional 30 million gallons per day that went online in May 2015.”
The now completed, more than $900 million Groundwater Replenishment System makes Orange County home to the world’s largest wastewater recycling plant.
The county’s wastewater is first treated at an OC Sanitation District plant in either Fountain Valley or Huntington Beach. Then, instead of…
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