By Benjamin Minch, Staff Writer
Flush and forget is a perfect description of how we use our water. Here in Fountain Valley, students are constantly trashing bathrooms because they think that the water they contaminate will just flush away to the ocean. This is not the case however, as 70% of the water you flush gets reused and will end up in your tap or even a bottle!
Many do not realize that our water department is doing something special in Orange County. The Orange County Water Department (OCWD) developed the first groundwater replenishment system in the world, one that was soon copied by water districts in Singapore and Australia. This state of the art system takes on 180 million gallons of water from the Orange County Sanitation Department (OCSD) and filters it through a complex process to put it back into the ground, where it will be used by household taps once again. Currently the groundwater replenishment system has generated over 251 billion gallons of water for the city.
The process itself is very highly regulated and complex to ensure that nothing harmful enters our taps. Water is first sent through a giant bar screen to filter out anything that isn’t soluble such as plastics, food items and “flushable” wipes. Next, the water is sent to primary treatment in giant settling tanks. Here it is left to settle and giant arms scrape oils and less dense things off the top and the bottom. Next, the water is sent to the aeration tank where bacteria break down particles in the water to purify it. The things that are removed are sent to the dewatering station, where they are squeezed and turned into fertilizer for local farms.
After leaving the OCSD, the water is then sent to the OCWD, which happens to be a two minute walk away. There, the water goes through a process of microfiltration, where thousands of mini straws with holes of .2 microns (smaller than a human hair) are used to suck water molecules and other small things through. After that, the water is sent through reverse osmosis “the purest process of them all” said Becky Mudd, a worker at the water district. In this process, water is pushed out of a plastic tube which is only permeable to water at really high pressure. The final step is ultraviolet radiation and then the water is perfectly safe to drink and is sent into the ground.
The GWRS is a state-of-the-art system and according to Mudd “the first of its kind around the world”. “We’ve had people from Singapore and many other countries observe how we made this,” said Mudd. What we are doing in Orange County is unique across the world and many fail to realize this until they tour the facilities. This system makes Orange County extremely drought resistant, as most of our water isn’t reliant on rain or imported from Northern California.
The plant itself uses an immense amount of energy, but it has even found a way to cut this environmental impact. The plant has its own power generator on site that reuses the methane gas, produced by bacteria in secondary treatment, to power almost the entire site. “This process saves taxpayer over 5 million dollars a year” said Mudd.
It is awesome to know that our system in Orange County is one of the most sustainable in the world. Who would’ve known that Fountain Valley is actually a place of global leadership in the form of water use. The plant continues to grow as well and plans to expand to eventually recycle 80% of all water in the coming years.
