Billion gallons of water to fill basin

Andrew Edwards

After about 11 years, a landslide and a lawsuit, the San Joaquin

Reservoir is officially back in business.

Officials from the Irvine Ranch Water District, Newport Beach and

other cities on Thursday joined homeowners whose houses overlook the

basin for a short dedication ceremony, which ended as water gushed

into the partially filled basin.

The reservoir, which sits in the hills above Bonita Canyon Sports

Park, can hold about 1 billion gallons of water when full and will

store recycled water that will mostly be used to irrigate landscaping

in Newport Coast and parts of Irvine, project engineer Michael

Hoolihan said. Much of the water stored in the reservoir would have

otherwise been discharged into Newport Bay.

Though the completion of the $16-million project was commemorated

Thursday, water has been flowing into the reservoir since a few days

before Christmas, Hoolihan said. The presence of water was a relief

to neighbors, who had tired of looking at a giant cavity in the

ground for more than a decade.

“Our property values go up because we’re overlooking water instead

of an empty hole,” neighbor Marsha Steinbrenner beamed.

The reservoir, then operated by the Metropolitan Water District,

was shut down in 1994 after a landslide that took five years to

repair. That agency would have had to build a cover over the

reservoir, which neighbors did not want, to be able to store drinking

water in the basin after the landslide damage was fixed. But when the

estimated price tag for a cover shot up from $17 million to about $35

million, the Metropolitan Water District nixed the project.

The Irvine Ranch Water District purchased the reservoir in 2001,

and construction to reopen the basin started in January of last year,

but the project was altered by a 2001 lawsuit filed by Newport Beach

environmental group Defend the Bay.

After the lawsuit was filed, the plan was changed to include

facilities to pump groundwater to prevent seepage from entering the

Back Bay and to use liquid chlorine to treat the water instead of

chlorine gas. Defend the Bay founder Bob Caustin said he was

satisfied with the project as completed, though he was disappointed

Newport Beach officials did not demand the modifications he sued for

when they sold their stake in the reservoir to the water district.

“It was a shame we had to spend our limited reserves on the

fight,” he said.

Hoolihan characterized having to change the project because of the

lawsuit, as well as post-Sept. 11 security concerns regarding the

presence of chlorine gas, as a learning experience.

“When someone challenges it, it forces you to look at the project

from a different perspective,” he said.