The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Board of Directors recently voted to begin the process of constructing their new water treatment facility in Carson, CA. The contract was just shy of $14 million and it will result in the construction of an advanced water treatment facility that will hopefully add 500,000 gallons per day of purified recycled water to groundwater basins throughout Southern California.
This proposed site will operate for at least a year in order to act as a test facility to demonstrate the feasibility of a much larger site that could be built within the next 10 or 15 years if approved. This full scale version could potentially process and produce 150 million gallons of purified water a day that would then be allowed to filter into the basins that already store water for hundreds of thousands of people across the region.
Currently, the waste water is treated and then pumped into the ocean. This new site would take further steps, including reverse osmosis, to purify that treated water and send it to the existing fresh water basins where it could eventually be utilized by residents of Southern California.
Investing in this infrastructure and creating a new source of potable water that residents can draw from could prove to be vital during California’s frequent periods of extreme drought.