COUNTYWIDE : MWD Rep Talks on Weathering Drought

A representative from the Metropolitan Water District told a group of Orange County business people Monday that continued conservation of existing water supplies and new water reclamation programs are key to weathering the state’s five-year drought.

Brad Hiltscher, a government representative for the MWD, said that despite the rains of March, the district is still in need of stringent water regulations.

“We have about 350,000 people moving into the area next year, and good water management practices are essential to keeping the a water supply available for everybody,” Hiltscher said.

Hiltscher, speaking to about 20 people at the Tustin office of Harding Lawson Associates, an engineering and environmental services company, said the MWD services about 300 cities and unincorporated areas in the district’s 5,200-square-mile area. If the current growth rate continues, the MWD’s consumer population could increase to about 20 million people by the year 2019, Hiltscher said.

Hiltscher also said that while this year’s drought damage was not as severe as the district feared, the amount of water available was still not equal to customer demand.

“We thought we’d be about 50% short of meeting our customers’ demands,” he said. “But the rains made us a little over 30% short, which is an improvement, but still not where we want to be.”

One of the programs the district is working on is waste-water reclamation, in which highly treated waste water is reused for non-potable purposes, such as park irrigation. Hiltscher said the MWD expects this program to yield 61,971 acre-feet of water each year. An acre-foot of water is about 326,000 gallons of water, enough to meet the needs of two families for a year.

Along with water reclamation, the MWD is funding the lining of 66 miles of canals delivering irrigation water to Coachella and Imperial valleys, Hiltscher said. He said 100,000 acre-feet of water lost to leakage in the unlined portion of the canals could be saved by this process.