Pooling County Resources : Water: Agency wants new reservoir in case of major quake; critics call idea all wet.

The Big One, measured between 7.5 and 8.0 on the Richter Scale, rolls down the San Andreas fault. Amid the devastation, the life-sustaining aqueducts and canals that carry water to the Metropolitan Water District in Los Angeles and then south to a thirsty San Diego County are severed.

Within 48 hours, spigots in places like Del Mar, Oceanside, Vista, Olivenhain, Rancho Bernardo and Valley Center run dry. Water must be trucked to homes and businesses. Despite sharp cutbacks in consumption, biotech, agriculture and other industries are hit hard.

The emergency lasts six months before normal water service can be restored.

That, at least, is the nightmare vision of the San Diego County Water Authority, which once again is intensifying its campaign to guarantee the county a six-month emergency water supply by developing a large new reservoir or expanding existing ones to hold the reserve.

“This is to provide the city with a reliable source of water in a major emergency,” said Michael Wright, special projects coordinator for the Water Authority. “Clearly, there is an emergency deficit that exists today, even if we didn’t build another house in this county.”

But critics of the effort, which could cost as much as $700 million and raise monthly water bills by 12%, say the plan is an overblown response to a crisis that may never occur. Some suspect an ulterior motive: To guarantee a reliable water supply that would ensure the region’s growth.

“They have not established the real potential for a disruption of our water supply in North County,” said Don Wood, former president of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3, who is monitoring the Water Authority plans. “They have not established the potential for an earthquake, the size of the earthquake, what it would do to the multiple (pipelines) of the system and the repair time. They just have not done their homework.”

Through initial screening, the Water Authority has narrowed the list of potential sites to five: Pamo Valley; Moosa Canyon, north of Escondido; Guejito Valley, northeast of Escondido; San Vicente reservoir, a facility owned by the city of San Diego that could be expanded; and Lake Wohlford, a city of Escondido reservoir that could also be enlarged.

Because of their comparatively small size, Guejito Valley, San Vicente or Lake Wohlford might be paired with another site, possibly the southern half of Moosa Canyon, or with one another.

In a three-year evaluation that will cost $10 million, the Water Authority will balance the advantages of each site against the drawbacks of cost, environmental damage, the need to force people from their homes and the chance of inundating local Indian burial grounds.

To the despair of environmentalists, the list of sites again includes Pamo Valley, which in the 1980s became a battleground for activists determined to halt the Water Authority’s plan to construct a 264-foot concrete dam there. The Water Authority finally withdrew its proposal in the face of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency objections that other potential sites for the reservoir had not been studied.

Now five sites will be reviewed, and Pamo Valley has emerged as one of them because of the very advantages cited when the city of San Diego purchased the area more than 60 years ago for use as a future reservoir.

“The reason they went up and bought land in 1928 is it’s a great dam site,” Wright said. A dam across Santa Ysabel Creek, which voters in 1984 agreed to build with a bond issue, would provide one of the lowest-cost projects per unit of water storage, and the land is already in government hands.

But environmentalists have long contended that inundating the pristine valley floor is unacceptable. A 1988 city report concluded that a dam would destroy 1,339 acres of “high-quality wildlife habitat, including areas occupied by the least Bell’s vireo.”

San Diego City Councilman John Hartley is moving to protect the area permanently and has asked the city manager and city attorney’s offices to advise the council how that can be done.

From the Water Authority’s perspective, the likelihood of an emergency is real. Besides the six-month water cutoff that would be produced by disruption of major aqueducts, an earthquake farther south could sever the five lines that bring water from the MWD, the giant Los Angeles water wholesaler, into San Diego County, causing an emergency that could last two months. Those same lines also could be washed out in a heavy flood.

Finally, the kind of severe drought that almost pushed the county to a 50% cut in water use last summer would be considered an emergency, said Mark Stadler, a spokesman for the Water Authority.

Meanwhile, county population has long since outstripped the tiny local water supply, particularly in the North County, where much of the growth in recent years has occurred but where few natural reservoirs exist.

County residents consume more than 600,000 acre-feet of water in one year. An acre-foot is equal to about 326,000 gallons of water, or enough to supply two households for an entire year. Much of it comes right to homes--after treatment--without ever being stored, because most reservoirs are too small to hold much water or too remote to be hooked into the system that brings water south from the MWD.

Only San Vicente reservoir, and Sweetwater and Lower Otay reservoirs in the South Bay are used to store imported water, and all are too far south to serve North County well. In fact, the county has not built a new reservoir since 1953.

According to Water Authority figures, a catastrophe that cut off MWD supplies would leave the county nearly 40,000 acre-feet short of its emergency need right now, a figure that will jump to 143,000 acre-feet by the year 2030.

If local pipelines were wiped out, the county would be more than 72,000 acre-feet short right now, and more than 110,000 acre-feet behind by 2030. All the figures assume the benefits of continuing water reclamation and conservation programs.

The development of MWD’s huge Domenigoni Reservoir in Riverside, which will hold more water than San Diegans consume in a year, would help ease any crisis, but much of that water would be siphoned off by other consumers in a crisis, Wright said. Domenigoni is not expected to open until early next century, he said.

The potential San Diego County reservoirs have been winnowed from a list of 27 surface sites and 30 ground water basins. Underground storage of water was deemed too risky, however, because in a natural disaster, electricity for pumps might fail and the basins themselves might be subject to liquefaction.

The Water Authority will continue to study ways to decrease demand and will look into reconfiguring the use of existing reservoirs to see if more water can be stored and piped to homes.

But, according to the Water Authority, the major solution probably lies among the five sites now being explored: Moosa Canyon, which is capable of holding 148,000 acre-feet of water, Pamo Valley (132,000 acre-feet), San Vicente (84,000), Guejito Valley (73,000 acre-feet) and Lake Wohlford (46,000 acre-feet). Moosa Canyon South, which might be used in tandem with one of the other small sites, could hold 72,000 acre-feet.

“If you want to assure that your reliability isn’t threatened at all, you build the big site,” Wright said. “If you’re willing to live with a certain amount of discomfort . . . maybe you build the smaller one.”

Sensitive animal species are known to exist at all the sites except Lake Wohlford, where the major problem is that residents would lose their homes to the inundation. They have already begun organizing to oppose any expansion. Two homes would be displaced by the flooding of Moosa canyon.

Along with a federal requirement to do the least environmental damage possible, planners also must consider how easily land could be acquired. Guejito Valley, for example, is in the hands of a single property owner.

“These all have sets of problems,” Wright said. “We’re trying to balance the environmental stuff and the human side of this.”

The agricultural, nursery and biotech industries support the concept of a reliable source of water for emergency use, Wright said.

“Any biotech company would be in significant jeopardy (during an emergency), particularly one engaged in manufacturing on any scale,” said Matt Swartz, a member of the San Diego Biocommerce Assn. “The effort on the table to do this will make it a lot easier for companies to make a responsible decision on availability of natural resources.”

But skeptics are not convinced that this is a project that needs to be built at all.

Several opponents said the Water Authority has yet to prove that the devastating earthquake it is predicting will ever occur, that it would wipe out the water supply system or that modern technology could not quickly provide stopgaps and repairs.

A 1982 state study concludes that, even with a major earthquake along active fault lines, the flow of water coming from the Colorado River would continue uninterrupted, said Wood, of Citizens Coordinate for Century 3.

The five pipelines now carrying water into the county (a sixth is being planned) were sold to residents as necessary safeguards against a major quake, he recalled.

“Five times they sold this horse, and five times we bought the horse,” he said, “and now they’re telling us the horse don’t work.”

“Why are they assuming that all of (the aqueducts) are going to be broken to the tune of six months repair time?” Wood continued.

Stadler, the Water Authority spokesman, said other agencies have conducted sufficient seismic evaluations, and that the Water Authority is secure in its conclusions.

But Bob Hartman, secretary of the Pamo Valley Conservancy, a coalition of environmental groups, believes the Water Authority’s ulterior motive is to provide a water supply for population growth.

As many have in the past, Hartman notes that the Water Authority’s chairman is Mike Madigan, vice president of Pardee Construction, a major home builder and a major force in civic affairs.

“I’m convinced the reason for an additional reservoir is to supply more water to San Diego County for population growth,” Hartman said.

Water Authority officials deny the charge, noting they are separately studying the need for seasonal storage in underground basins to supply population growth.

If the need for a reservoir is proven, the Pamo Valley Conservancy wants San Vicente expanded so that no new site need be destroyed, said Norma Sullivan, conservation chairwoman for the San Diego chapter of the national Audubon Society. The dam there was built in such a way that it can be enlarged, officials said.

With the selection still two to three years off, and probably longer if litigation results, the new reservoir will not be in use until at least 2000, officials acknowledge. Until then, Wright said, the Water Authority will press forward and hope that the Big One doesn’t wipe out the local water supply before emergency reserves are available.