Short-Lived Water Crisis Wave of the Future?

On Super Bowl Sunday, hot Santa Ana winds and the temporary shutdown of a water treatment plant for long-planned maintenance converged, making some water-intensive businesses in San Diego County mighty anxious.

"We had two or three days of nervous anticipation, waiting for something to go

On Feb. 5, the San Diego County Water Authority stopped water deliveries to its member agencies to allow the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California to complete expansion work on the Skinner Water Treatment Plant in Temecula. The plant provides about half the treated water used in San Diego County and provides water to southern Riverside County.

The expansion will increase the plant's capacity from 525 million gallons a day to 635 million gallons a day when it goes on line in 2007, according to the Water Authority, which serves the San Diego region as a wholesale supplier of water from the Colorado River and Northern California, working through its 23 member agencies.

But the shutdown, three years in the making, happened to coincide with unseasonably hot weather, as well Super Bowl Sunday, when much liquid is famously consumed - and subsequently voided - further tapping resources.

Calls had gone out, with varying degrees of success, appealing to businesses and residents alike to significantly reduce their use of water during the planned shutdown. The call was especially urgent for the harder-hit North County, served by the Fallbrook Utility District, and the Rainbow, Vallecitos and Valley Center municipal water districts.

"This is an extremely serious situation that necessitates immediate and dramatic reductions on treated water use among these North County water agencies," said Bill Jacoby, public affairs director for the San Diego County Water Authority, in a Feb. 7 news conference in Fallbrook. "A concentrated effort now by all water users is necessary to avoid more drastic measures later."

Deliveries resumed Feb. 12, four days earlier than originally planned, according to agency spokesman John Liarakos, easing what could have been a serious setback for some of the county's heavier water users.

"We are prepared to deal with this under normal circumstances, but Mother Nature decided it wasn't going to be normal," said Liarakos. "We do our shutdowns generally when it's cool and wet and water demand is down, and our agencies can work on their reserves.

"This was a significant shutdown, and we got hit with this hot weather and water demands go up," he said. "Demands drained these reserves faster than they had planned, causing a crisis of water availability for their customers."

Too Soon To Call

TIm Stripe, the chairman of the Carlsbad Chamber of Commerce and co-president of the Grand Pacific Resorts in Carlsbad, got through the dry spell, but admitted that, "It was scary."

"An appeal was never made to our company to tell the guests to shower every other day," he said. "But if the plant had not reopened, I was working through who are incoming guests and groups were - working on a spin.

"How do I break the news on how to conserve water, for organizations coming from outside the area, especially, and saying to them, 'I have one small problem. I don't have any water for you.' The thought did cross my mind, 'How severe will this get?' Yes, we'd have to call up people before they came, and maybe help them find somewhere else to go."

As a hotelier and chamber chairman, Stripe said he doesn't think water concerns have dampened any company's desire to locate to San Diego - at least not so far.

"For the most part, when they turn on the spigot, they've gotten water," said Stripe. "But, as the whole area develops outside of the city, and increases demands on the water supply to the general area, yes, I think that potentially could be an issue, for the whole gamut of businesses. If there is suddenly a lack of availability of water to the residential community, I don't know how many people will want to live there."

Al Stehly, the chief financial officer of Stehly Farm Management in Valley Center, owns a 60-acre grove of avocados in Valley Center, and manages an additional 400 acres, half citrus and half avocados, in other areas of North County. He said that it's still too soon to fully gauge how much of a hit his crops took.

"We've got some trees wilting, and that is not good for this time of year," he said. "We could lose production for next year."

The normal harvest period for avocados, he said, is late November, through July or August.

"Once the trees start wilting, they suck moisture out of the fruit," he said. "If the tree is in serious stress, shedding fruit, the fruit will ripen, and it's not as good for marketing. There would be reluctance on the part of our packers to take it, because it shrivels up."

Ceballos, who said that his company takes in about $20 million annually in sales, also is waiting to assess the damage.

"This is our busiest time of the year," he said. "We probably have about $10 million of plants on the ground, in containers outside."

Ceballos complied with the Rainbow Water District's request to conserve, and cut back about 20 percent of normal water usage, which can be risky.

"If you reduce the water, you slow down the growth of plants," he explained. "That can lengthen the time it takes to get to market. In other areas, we had to keep the greenhouses darker, so they'd be cooler and use less water. The plants stretch out. It's not the quality that we like to see in them - taller and skinnier."

Eric Larson, the executive director of the San Diego County Farm Bureau, said any water cutback, however necessary, can be especially tough on farmers.

"If they've lost their use of water, some may suffer damage, possibly the loss of a nursery crop," he said. "With ornamentals, they have very little tolerance for lack of water. If the soil in a container dries out, they can be damaged very quickly."

Man With A Plan

Steve Bergquist, co-owner of the Green Thumb Nursery in San Marcos, rented a 6,500-gallon storage tank a couple of days before the plant shutdown to head off any possible damage to his inventory, which includes everything from shrubs, trees and vines, to ornamentals - indoor flowering and foliage plants, the No. 1 crop in San Diego County.

"Ornamentals are our main business," he said. "With ornamentals, even if you don't lose them, they can be unsalable, and sometimes you have to discard the plant."

Hence, the emergency tank.

"We anticipated the issue," said Bergquist. "We thought we might not need it, but it was better to be safe. I watered everything thoroughly prior to the restriction, so we were wet and hydrated.

"In California, normal weather is the average of two extremes," he said. "We were soaking wet last year at this time. Now, it's dry and warm, and sometimes it's in the middle.

Searching For Answers

While the recent plant shutdown and dry spell were a temporary inconvenience, the potential in Southern California for serious water problems is major, said Don McDougal, vice president and CEO of Grand Tradition, a special events venue spread out over 30 acres in Fallbrook. He also serves as president of the Fallbrook Public Utility District.

"Without water, we are a desert," he said. "We depend on the Metropolitan Water District. If there is a major catastrophic failure, all areas of Southern California could be greatly at risk. Should there be a major interruption, everybody is going to go on rationing."

The Answer?

"More reservoir storage and more water infrastructure," said McDougal. "We have enough storage in the Fallbrook area to last for several weeks of interruption, but some areas don't have that capacity They are at great risk."

But who's going to pay in the long run?

"The impact on nurseries and agriculture is severe, and we have to address this," said Darrell Gentry, the chairman of the business retention, recruitment and resource committee for the San Marcos Chamber of Commerce and a director of the Vallecitos Water District. "Where do you draw the line? How many public dollars, in terms of taxes, can we pass on to customers to create water storage and a perfect world? It's a terrible expense, and one that the public doesn't believe it is reasonable to explore. We agree. We already pay a significant cost for the water we do supply.

"Everybody is planning to diversify the supply, to spread it out so we don't have to rely on a single pipeline," he said. "There is no single silver bullet."

As an example of bolstering water supplies to the county, the local Water Authority is planning to build a regional water treatment facility - the Twin Oaks Valley Water Treatment Plant - which would produce up to 100 million gallons of treated water per day, and is expected to come on line in 2008.

Shoring Up

Joe Panetta, the president and chief executive officer of Biocom, a life science industry association representing more than 450 member companies in San Diego and Southern California, said he hadn't heard about the recent crunch.

"Consistency is always important when it comes to life science companies," Panetta said. "We need to continue to find new sources to move toward self-sufficiency in terms of our water supply. Life science companies depend on water to run their businesses."

Gentry, who also is a land-use planner with his Escondido/San Marcos-based DWG Consulting, is confident the biosciences shouldn't have to worry about being left high and dry.

"The water district that serves these specific companies will continue to make sure that they have reliable highquality water available for their development," he said. "I think the water supply will be adequate to serve these growing industries."

Failure To Communicate

Some businesses complained that they did not get adequate notice - or any notice at all - about the plant shutdown and calls for conservation.

"It was an unfortunate gathering of problems when the weather got warm," said the Farm Bureau's Larson. "Water consumption went up, in large part because the public didn't take it seriously. The issue is, how much did the public know and how well did it respond to the request for conservation? In a postmortem, this will need to be studied. In the future, we need to figure out how to move the public quickly to drastic conservation mode. All the different water districts had different methodologies, a patchwork of messages."

Ceballos complained neither he, nor other businesses in the area, were aware of the shutdown.