NEXT L.A. : The Water Cycle Gets Recycled : The East Valley Water Project plans to reuse waste water after letting it percolate through the soil for five years.

Within a few years, some of the water that goes down the drain in Los Angeles may come back out the faucet. That, say water officials, will be a good thing.

Newspapers, soda cans, plastic bottles, cardboard. Now add water to the list of recyclables.

Los Angeles generates a huge amount of waste water each day. After expensive treatment, nearly all of it flows into the Pacific Ocean, completing a journey that typically begins in the Sierra Nevada or the Colorado River.

Letting all that treated sewer water escape to the ocean has pained officials of the city Department of Water and Power, who have to keep up with the water needs of a growing population.

In October, the state Regional Water Quality Control Board approved plans to use cleaned-up waste water to replenish the ground water beneath the San Fernando Valley. If the city can overcome challenges by the Miller Brewing Co. and some environmentalists who assert that recycled water poses health risks, the East Valley Water Recycling Project could begin construction in the spring and go on-line as soon as 1998.

Some environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, strongly favor the project. It would lessen the demand on distant mountain water sources where Los Angeles obtains most of its supply.

Such water use is “damaging to the environmental habitats of the other parts of the state,” said David Czamanske, water committee chair for the Sierra Club’s Los Angeles chapter.

The San Fernando Valley water basin stretches from the San Gabriel Mountains south to the area around Dodger Stadium. When it rains, water seeps down through the soil and collects on top of solid bedrock.

“It’s like a big bathtub full of sand and gravel,” said Gerald Gewe, director of water resources planning at the DWP.

The recycling project was designed to help make sure that the bathtub never dries up. “What we’re proposing is to supplement that rainfall,” Gewe said.

The Donald C. Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys processes about 60 million gallons a day of waste water that now is released into the Los Angeles River, bound for the ocean, or helps fill Lake Balboa, a small recreation area near the plant in the Sepulveda Dam basin.

To DWP officials, the torrent dumped in the river each day is a huge untapped resource. According to Gewe, the water coming out of the Tillman plant already meets drinking water standards except for higher-than-allowed levels of nitrogen.

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The recycling project would involve building a pumping station and laying 13 miles of 4 1/2-foot-diameter pipe from the Tillman plant across the East San Fernando Valley to the Hansen spreading grounds near Sun Valley. A second phase would extend the pipeline to the nearby Pacoima spreading grounds.

These ponds currently collect runoff from the mountains and aqueduct water from the Sierra Nevada and let it soak into the ground to resupply the aquifer.

The reclaimed water would be added to the mix. As it percolates 200 feet down through the ground, microbes would take care of the excess nitrogen, Gewe said.

“The bacteria sort of eat it up as it goes through the soil,” he said. “By the time it makes it to the water table, it will meet all drinking water standards.”

Once the reclaimed water makes it to the water table, it will take five years to travel 6,000 feet to the DWP pumping wells--”the straws going down to the bathtub” in Gewe’s words. Once drawn by the wells, the reclaimed water completes its circuit back to the faucet. Even then, the reclaimed water would be diluted, at most one part reclaimed water for each four parts new, Gewe said.

The $55-million first phase would pump, on average, 100 gallons per second into the Hansen ponds. That would be enough water for 20,000 people, but would meet only a fraction of L.A.’s water needs, which are expected to grow 10% by the turn of the century.

Still, Gewe described the East Valley project as the cornerstone of the DWP’s goal of reusing 40% of its water by 2010. The agency would eventually like to triple the amount of water recycled out of Tillman.

The chief opponent of the project is the Miller Brewing Co. in Irwindale, 30 miles away in the San Gabriel Valley. The brewery is too far away to have its water supply affected by the East Valley project, but “Miller has a long record of working to protect water quality,” said Andrew Yamamoto, a lawyer representing the beer company.

Miller is also battling a similar project in the San Gabriel Valley, where it has succeeded in getting a court to throw out the environmental impact report. In the East Valley controversy, Miller does not out-and-out oppose the project. But in appealing the October approval to the State Water Resources Board, it argued that there have not been enough studies.

“There’s inadequate information for policy makers to adequately evaluate the project’s risks,” Yamamoto said.

Ellen Stern Harris, executive director of Fund for the Environment in Beverly Hills, is not so circumspect.

“If you could choose any other water source you would,” Harris said. She charges that viruses, bacteria and heavy metals could make it through the Tillman’s treatment processes and that degraded water could be deadly to people with weakened immune systems, such as the elderly. “We can ill afford to lose an entire aquifer,” she said.

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Water officials point out that water recycling is hardly an original idea. In eastern Los Angeles County, the Montebello Forebay ground water recharge project, which is five times larger than the first phase of the East Valley project, has been using reclaimed water to replenish ground water since 1962.

A 1984 study by the UCLA School of Public Health found that reclaimed water had no ill effects on either the ground water quality or the health of people who drank it, said Earle Hartling, water resources coordinator with the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County. A follow-up study by Rand Corp. should be out early next year.

Although “one cannot say with absolute certainty there is no chance” of contamination, Gewe maintained, tests so far have indicated the water meets current safety guidelines. “We’ve had very little opposition to this,” he said. “The public seems to accept the concept.”

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THE NEWEST RECYCLABLE: WATER

Each day a torrent of treated waste water from the Donald C. Tillman sewage plant in the Sepulveda Dam Basin gets dumped into the Los Angeles River. A new plan would reclaim that water and use it to recharge the aquifer beneath the San Fernando Valley.

1. Highly treated water from the sewage plant would be piped xx miles to spreading grounds near Hansen Dam in Pacoima, and allowed to seep into the ground.

2. The waste water mixes with the ground water. City Department of Water and Power wells tap the aquifer to supplement water imported by aqueduct from Northern California, the Owens Valley and the Colorado River.

3. The mixed ground water takes about two years to travel 1.5 miles to the wells. It is disinfected before being piped to customers.

Source: Los Angeles Department of Water and Power