Sacramento Preparing For Worse Drought Conditions By Fixing Intake Facility Pumps
SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — The water flowing through your home's plumbing may first have traveled down the Sacramento or American rivers. Two large river intake facilities pump the river water before it heads to the water treatment facility. Earlier in the drought, however, the water level dropped lower than engineers ever prepared for and getting the water out of the river became a problem.
"We had a little bit of a scare early last year when the river levels went down and our pumps started to shake," said Sacramento City Utilities interim director Bill Busatch.
Sacramento is now making use of its slice of $200 million dollars set aside earlier this year by Gov. Jerry Brown for statewide drought projects.
At the water intake facility, the pumps can't suck up the water if levels drop below two feet. Thursday morning, the water in the facility was at 2.5 feet.
Too much air creates what engineers call a vortex in the pump, so the new grant money bought special grids to stop the problem.
"The grid straightens the flow of water into those pumps, so you're not introducing vortesis - the swirling of the water when the water gets lower than we envisioned it getting," said senior utilities engineer Brett Ewart.
Sacramento didn't want to wait on the grant, so it fronted the money first for these grids to get them on the pumps now. Officials said they're not waiting for an emergency.
"If the drought doesn't continue, it's stuff that needs to happen anyway," said Yolo County Flood Control general manager Tim O'Halloran, whose county also received special drought-proof assistance grants.
Officials plan to install the drought-proof grids in the second water intake facility in Fairburn next month.