The Vallecitos Water District won an Excellence in Innovation and Resilience Award with environmentally-friendly algae control technology. Known for its sustainable approach to water treatment, the award-winning utility chose to control algal blooms with LG Sonic technology. The award recognizes efforts in the innovative application of technology to the wastewater field and was handed by California Association of Sanitation Agencies.
UC San Diego has created a wastewater and surface coronavirus testing program designed specifically for schools in disadvantaged communities hard-hit by COVID.
The testing not only allows for faster results than traditional COVID testing, but UC San Diego researchers say it could be less costly and easier to implement in communities with families who may not want their children tested in schools, out of fear or a lack of trust.
Imperial Irrigation District power customers with certain past due debts will be automatically enrolled in a new mandatory payment plan starting Wednesday, and power shut-offs are set to resume for customers who do not fulfill their financial obligations.
The plan, approved by the Board of Directors last month, affects past due customers who owed more than $50 as of Dec. 31, 2020.
The Santa Ana Regional Water Board released a tentative order Friday detailing proposed revisions to Poseidon Water’s controversial proposed $1.4-billion water desalination project in Huntington Beach.
In its 25-year plan ensuring the San Diego region has enough water to go around, the county’s largest water provider didn’t appear to take the region’s biggest water recycling project to date very seriously, at least at first.
Emails between the San Diego County Water Authority staff and city of San Diego officials show the city had to argue for the second and biggest phase of its Pure Water program to be considered a realistic future source of drinking water. That surprised San Diego, which is the Water Authority’s biggest customer and is legally required to construct its wastewater recycling project.
Three wildfires have crept close to Nathan Rakov’s 30-acre chicken ranch in rural Alpine since he moved there in 2006. If his barn, coops and storage rooms burned down, he’d struggle to rebuild because he hasn’t found a complete and affordable insurance policy.
San Diego is experiencing one of the driest Februaries it has had in nearly 170 years due to weather patterns that are sending most winter storms into the Pacific Northwest and Northern California rather than allowing them to drop south, says the National Weather Service.
Addressing the San Diego region’s limited local water supplies with innovative ideas is something the San Diego County Water Authority has become known for. Using expertise gained from decades of successful planning and projects, the Water Authority is developing strategies to reduce the future cost of water that sustains the economy and quality of life across the county.
Those efforts are ramping up in early 2021, following a Water Authority Board decision to continue assessing the potential for a new aqueduct to transport San Diego’s low-cost, high-priority water supplies from the Colorado River to San Diego County.
California is poised to begin the first major restoration project at the Salton Sea. The state is investing more than $200 million in a project that will create flooded ponds and other habitats on the exposed lakebed at the southern edge of the lake. “We’ll complete the work over the next two-and-a-half years, I believe completing the project in 2023,” said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency. The Salton Sea has been shrinking rapidly and exposing a dusty lakebed since the Imperial Irrigation District stopped feeding the state’s largest lake mitigation water in 2018.
A major construction project to improve drinking water supply reliability in North County will start in February after the San Diego County Water Authority’s Board of Directors January 28 approved an $11.4 million contract for the work to Pacific Hydrotech Corporation of Perris, California.
The Hauck Mesa Storage Reservoir project includes demolition of an abandoned steel tank, building a 2.1 million-gallon storage reservoir connected to the Valley Center Pipeline, and construction of an isolation vault and an underground flow control facility. The project is expected to be completed by winter 2022.
