(Photo courtesy of the city of Santa Monica) The SWIP includes a 1.5-million-gallon stormwater harvesting tank and one-million-gallon-per-day advanced water treatment facility. It supplements the rest with imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River. Santa Monica currently derives almost 60-70% of its water from local groundwater naturally recharged from rain that falls into the Santa Monica mountains. Local water is a catchall phrase for rainwater, stormwater, recycled water, urban runoff and salty, brackish groundwater that could be recycled and reused. Santa Monica’s sustainable water project has been in the works for more than a decade, following a 2011 City Council directive to look into the feasibility of providing all of the city’s water supplies locally. Last week, the SWIP also received the National Water Reuse Association’s transformational innovation award. “We look at this as a model for other utilities that are considering similar projects,” Wang said.Īs the state weathered public outcry last month about billions of gallons of stormwater being washed away to the ocean when it could instead be used to alleviate the drought, California Environmental Protection Agency Secretary Yana Garcia visited the SWIP, which the state helped to fund as a model for future projects. Santa Monica's Sustainable Water Infrastructure Project takes stormwater, urban runoff and municipal wastewater and purifies it for potable reuse. ![]() The system is the first in the state of California to treat stormwater and inject it directly into the groundwater basin to recharge local supplies. Now, as part of a separate project completed five years ago, that stormwater is captured in a 1.6-million-gallon tank under the Santa Monica Pier parking lot and recycled through the SWIP. The measure taxes property owners 2.5 cents per square foot of impermeable surface area and uses the funds to increase water supplies from local sources.īefore this winter, rain that fell on the city was whisked into the Santa Monica Bay through the Pico-Kenter storm drain near Shutters on the Beach Hotel, Wang said. “We joke that it’s a $96 million parking lot,” Wang said of the project, which was funded with $75 million from the California Clean Water State Revolving Fund, $8.77 million in bonds from a voter-approved Proposition 1 stormwater grant and $7.5 million from Measure W, which Los Angeles County voters approved in 2018. Pictured here is Santa Monica's stormwater harvesting tank as it's being constructed.
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