CULVER CITY (CNS) – Los Angeles and Ventura county officials Wednesday broke ground on a $280 million pump station project designed to ensure water is available in Southland communities that were hard hit during recent California droughts.
The Sepulveda Feeder Pump Stations Project will allow the region’s water wholesaler — the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — to divert water from the Colorado River and Diamond Valley Lake to communities that normally rely on State Water Project supplies. The project will ensure that when water supplies are limited, SWP-reliant communities will have access to water from other sources.
When the project is completed in 2029, MWD will be able to deliver as much as 22,000 acre-feet of water to SWP-dependent areas during times of severe drought. An acre-foot of water is roughly 326,000 gallons, enough to serve about three families for a year.
MWD officials said that during the 2020-22 drought, multiple communities in Los Angeles and Ventura counties had limited water due to cutbacks in the availability of State Water Project water supplies.
“Metropolitan had never before imposed such strong reductions in water use on a portion of our service area. It was an unprecedented situation sparked by the hotter temperatures and more extreme droughts we are facing as the climate changes,” MWD General Manager Shivaji Deshmukh said in a statement. “When we saw the impacts of this historic drought on some portions of our service area, we committed to taking action to avoid this ever happening again.”
The pump station project will allow MWD to push water from the Colorado River and Diamond Valley Lake — the area’s largest reservoir — to normally SWP-reliant communities in northern Los Angeles and southern Ventura county.
The pumps will essentially reverse the flow of water in the pipelines.
“Under normal circumstances, our system largely relies on gravity to deliver water. But we learned during the last drought that left some communities without access to available water. Now, we will have the ability to pump more water uphill when needed,” Deshmukh said. “Simply put, this project strengthens our ability to move water where it*s needed during droughts, during emergencies, and when major infrastructure must be taken out of service for maintenance or rehabilitation.”
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