With the Golden State being plagued by "abnormally dry" conditions and having no signs of drought relief, San Diegans have taken matters into their own hands and moved a step closer to a more reliable, long-term water supply.
Embracing a once-toxic idea, the City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to approve a long-envisioned sewage purification system that will turn sewer water into drinking water, the Associated Press reported.
"We're at the end of the pipeline," said Councilman Scott Sherman about San Diego, a city of 1.4 million people that imports 85 percent of its water from the Colorado River and Northern California. "We have a real problem getting water down here."
The system will most likely exceed current water quality standards while supplying about a third of the city's daily needs and saving big bucks on wastewater treatment costs, experts said.
"It originally met with some opposition," says Matt O'Malley, a water scientist and attorney with San Diego Coastkeeper, a leading local environmental group.
"You have the moniker 'Toilet to Tap' -- it gets thrown around a lot," O'Malley said in a City Hall interview Tuesday. "But really, what people have to realize is that every source of water they have is recycled many times over. What we're just doing is maximizing that recycling here locally."
"It's better for the environment at the outfall. It's better for us from a water supply perspective," he added.
Initially, a million-gallon-a-day plant in North City was meant to attain the small goal of reaching 83 million gallons a day 20 years from now. "But much of the $3.5 billion cost of the project could be offset by avoiding expensive federal mandates to ramp up treatment of sewage pumped from the Point Loma Wastewater Plant into the Pacific," NBC News reported.
"Half of the flow that goes to Point Loma will be diverted, treated and then re-used," said city Public Utilities Director Halla Razak. "So the impact to the environment is definitely positive. When you look at the wastewater and the water costs, this is the right solution for San Diego. It's not only more economical, but it provides a local supply that is sustainable and drought-proof."
Although some critics claimed that the project would increase housing costs and encourage real estate speculation by developers, a 2012 survey by the San Diego County Water Authority showed that nearly three of four residents favored turning wastewater into drinking water, a major shift from one of four in a 2005 survey.
"Why are we taking water from hundreds of miles away -- spending all the money and energy to do that -- just to dump it into the ocean?" O'Malley asks. "We're going to need to squeeze very drop, literally, out of the system that we have. So this is a good first step, we think."
Still, it remains rare to turn sewage to drinking water. "The WateReuse Association, a group of agencies behind the efforts, counts only 10 projects nationwide, including El Paso, Texas, and Fairfax County, Virginia. Two Texas cities, Wichita Falls and Big Spring, started projects within the past two years," according to the AP.