ESCONDIDO –
The city is feeling the pinch from an increasing amount of sewage needing disposal and is considering several options, including storing it in recreational lakes.
The lakes would be similar in concept to the seven lakes that form the popular 190-acre Santee Lakes Recreation Preserve.
About 40 percent of the treated wastewater that Santee produces is stored in the lakes, creating a fishing and camping haven and a moneymaker that grossed about $3 million in revenue last year.
Escondido's goals are more modest, however. It just wants to get rid of its excess wastewater.
Recreational lakes are one of several options the city is exploring to solve the problem, which will become more urgent as the city grows.
The city's only wastewater treatment facility, the Hale Avenue Resource Recovery Center, is 50 years old and near capacity, despite upgrades and expansions over the years.
The plant, which can process up to 18 million gallons of sewage per day, is now treating about 15 million gallons daily.
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Developments
Escondido's sewage problem: The city's wastewater treatment plant, which processes 15 million gallons of sewage per day, is at 83 percent of its capacity.
What city needs: A facility that can treat and discharge 27.5 million gallons per day.
One solution: Expanding the treatment plant and installing a larger ocean outfall pipe, at a cost of about $500 million.
Alternatives being considered: Building recreational lakes for storing highly treated wastewater; creating wetlands that include pools of wastewater; injecting highly treated wastewater into the water table; discharging it directly into Escondido Creek. No cost estimates for these options are available.
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By the time Escondido is built out, which is about 12,000 housing units away, the sewage plant will be overwhelmed. The city will need to treat 27.5 million gallons of sewage a day.
To get there, however, could be extraordinarily expensive – about $500 million – a consultant has concluded. That's what the city would need to upgrade and expand the treatment plant to increase its intake capacity, and to install a larger ocean outfall pipe. The pipe, which follows Escondido Creek, crosses 14 miles of land and ends 8,000 feet offshore.
City officials are concerned about the high cost. In addition, the city's treatment plant is running out of space for expansion because it is adjacent to Indian archaeological sites and protected oak preserves.
Perhaps more important are the significant environmental hurdles the city will have to navigate to get permission for a larger ocean outfall pipe.
“It would probably take 10 years to do that,” said John Burcham, a deputy city utilities manager in charge of the sewage treatment plant.
Escondido's quandary is a common one, said Mark Alpert, enforcement coordinator for the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board, which polices water pollution issues.
“All treatment plants have problems with development. As more people and more businesses move in, they produce more sewage,” Alpert said. “They need to constantly think about upgrading to get more capacity and more treatment capability.”
Options to be studied
Escondido officials are looking for less expensive options. Last month, the City Council approved spending $51,000 to hire a San Diego-based consultant, Brown and Caldwell, to study the economics and benefits of various solutions to its wastewater problem. They include:
Building recreational lakes in the city to store treated wastewater.
Creating wetlands with standing ponds of wastewater in or outside the city.
Injecting treated wastewater into the water table. The problem with this plan is the water table is shallow in Escondido, which is in a valley, and the treated sewage could seep into low-lying yards and homes, Burcham said.
Discharging highly treated wastewater directly into Escondido Creek, an environmentally controversial proposal.
Buying out the 5 million-gallon-a-day capacity that San Diego has in Escondido's treatment plant. San Diego uses the Escondido plant to treat sewage from Rancho Bernardo.
Replacing the existing wastewater discharge pipe, which ranges from 30 inches to 36 inches in diameter, with a 42-inch pipe. The existing pipe can handle up to about 21 million gallons a day; the replacement would have a capacity of about 33 million gallons.
The consultant is expected to finish the study in a few weeks.
The city first hired Brown and Caldwell in September 2005 to evaluate the treatment plant for $586,000.
The firm produced a report in December 2006 that concluded Escondido would need to spend from $450 million to $533 million to upgrade the plant and install a larger outfall pipe.
Mayor Lori Holt Pfeiler has questioned why the city needs so much additional disposal capacity when it had installed an elaborate system to recycle wastewater.
Currently, the recycling system diverts from 3 million to 5 million gallons of the 15 million gallons of wastewater Escondido produces each day, cleans it further and distributes it throughout the city by a system of purple pipes. The water is used for irrigation and to cool Sempra's electricity generating plant.
But the recycling facility has a permit to treat no more than 9 million gallons of recycled water each day, Burcham said, and the city does not yet have additional customers who want more recycled water.
To recycle more wastewater, the city would need to expand its recycling plant. Recycling costs $1,500 more per million gallons than the lower-level treatment required for discharging it in the ocean.
“We are between a rock and hard place,” Burcham said.
The city is hoping that recreational lakes, wetlands or direct discharge into Escondido Creek may be the solution.
“The train is moving down the track. Every time we approve development, we take away sewer capacity,” said Charlie Grimm, Escondido's assistant city manager. “We need to get moving as quickly as possible and expand as quickly as possible.”
Fined for violations
The inadequacies of the Hale Avenue treatment plant have become apparent.
In late 2006, the city limited Stone Brewing to discharging no more than 25,000 gallons of wastewater a day into the city's treatment system. The city imposed the limit after concluding that Stone's beer-brewing wastewater contained so many organic solids that it was using up too much treatment capacity. Stone trucks its additional wastewater to a treatment plant in San Diego.
In 2005, the regional water quality board determined that Escondido was guilty of violations for improperly treating sewage and for spills, and the board fined the city $1.8 million.
The violations occurred in 2004 and 2005 and included 393 incidents of discharging inadequately treated sewage, a 280,000-gallon spill into Escondido Creek and a 73,000-gallon spill into San Elijo Lagoon, Alpert said.
The spills occurred during the heavy rains of 2005. The city said runoff water entering its sewage system overwhelmed storage ponds.
The city said the inadequately treated wastewater was the result of a company illegally dumping a toxic chemical into a sewer, which killed bacteria the treatment plant uses to clean wastewater.
Escondido officials negotiated with the regional board and reached a settlement agreement in 2006. The agreement specified that the city would pay $690,000 in fines and conduct comprehensive studies of the Hale Avenue facility's capacity.
But environmental groups appealed the settlement, arguing that the fines should have been higher. The state board overturned the settlement last year and sent the matter back to the regional board. Alpert said the regional board should have a decision soon.
Angela Lau: (760) 476-8240;
angela.lau@uniontrib.com
