West Sacramento Recycling Water Not Fit For Drinking To Save Its Trees
By Denise Wong
WEST SACRAMENTO (CBS13) — It may look refreshing, but it's not the kind of water you'd want to drink.
In fact, it's so contaminated, it would have been dumped as wastewater before this month. But now, West Sacramento has found a way to recycle that water and use it to keep thousands of city trees alive.
The city says it used to use about 1 million gallons of drinking water a month just to irrigate the grass and trees in the medians. Instead of letting trees die after the governor's mandate banned the practice, the city has found a way to use unwanted water to keep them in bloom.
You can't see all the chemicals and minerals in the water, but the sign on the truck makes it clear the water's been used, and is now being used again.
"For the last month we've been applying approximately 4,000 to 6,000 gallons a day to the trees and our street median," said Sam Cooney, supervisor of parks and grounds for the city.
The reclaimed water from the California Department of General Services cooling plant downtown may not sound interesting, but it's water that's been used to air condition the state Capitol and 23 other state buildings. When it goes through the system, it gets filled with minerals that make it unsafe for people to drink or even used on lawns.
"It was going to the Elk Grove Regional Sanitation Plant and then being released into the Delta from there so it wasn't being utilized at all," Cooney said.
But it can be used to water trees. Every weekday, the city fills a 2,000 gallon tank with reclaimed water from the plant at least twice a day and trucks it around town. Since irrigating in the medians is no longer allowed, ground crews have to hand-water the more than 2,000 city trees, but the city says it's worth it.
"This helps quite a bit," said Paulina Benner, environmental services manager for the city. "We do need to water some of our trees and stuff like that to keep them alive."
Saving trees is a priority, unlike the grass in the medians.
The city's agreement to use the reclaimed water will last through the summer and could go on past then. The city says the summer months are the most important when it's trying to reduce water usage. It's mandated to cut back use by 28 percent.
