City supports pumping water into ground

A soon-to-be-completed plan by the Orange County Water District to put highly treated water filtered from sewer lines back into the ground to boost drinking water supplies has the support of Huntington Beach officials. In fact, they said the city benefits more than nearly anywhere else where the project is in place.

The water is filtered extremely well through a reverse osmosis process that takes out even minuscule viruses, said county water district spokesman Ron Wildermuth.

Then it goes through a sterilizing process of heavy ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide, meant to break down anything left into harmless elements like carbon and hydrogen.

Finally, the ultra-purified water goes back into the ground — some into the water basin in Anaheim, and some right along Ellis Avenue — in the largest initiative of its kind in the world.

City Utilities Director Howard Johnson said the plan is good for the city and extremely safe.

At a time when imported water is becoming less reliable, it will boost the amount usable from city wells, which supply about three-quarters of the city’s water. The City Council also voted in favor of the project back in its planning stages.

“We strongly support the project,” Johnson said. “I have no reservations about that whatsoever, and if we did we’d have been vocal about it.”

The ambitious project will help Huntington Beach more than most cities because much of the water is being injected within city limits, Johnson said.

New injection wells have gone in all along Ellis Avenue, meant to pump millions of gallons of fresh water into the ground each day to wall off seawater that could otherwise ruin local wells.

Such facilities have existed in Huntington Beach since the 1970s, using treated sewer water, Wildermuth said.

But the problem of salt water outgrew the barrier against it, and this project doubles the amount being put into the ground while making the supply even cleaner, he added.

In addition to blocking off salt water, 80% of the new water comes back through the tap after a year filtering through sand and soil, Wildermuth said.

That’s another reason Johnson supports the project.

“Naturally it affects us because it increases the supply in the groundwater basin,” Johnson said. “We’re probably one of the closest cities to the injection barrier.”

Assemblyman Jim Silva said he supported the plan but had some cost-related reservations that made him want to look at other ways to boost local water production.

“One of the biggest drawbacks is the cost,” he said. “It is very expensive. What we should be looking at first is the desalination of our water. We have plenty of water and that will probably ultimately be the future solution to our water problems in Southern California.”