Los Angeles tap: The Best Tasting Water on Earth

By Timothy Allinson, P.E.

Murray Company, Long Beach, Calif.

Much to my surprise, Los Angeles was recently awarded the gold medal in the 18th annual International Water Tasting event for 2008. Actually, L.A. tied with Clearbrook, British Columbia - not surprising, given the name of that town. But considering that the City of Angels is actually a desert that imports water from hundreds of miles away to serve the largest population and farmland acreage anywhere in the country, it is indeed surprising that the water would be so tasty.

The contest was held on February 23 in the historic spa town of Berkeley Springs, W. Va. The samples were judged by a "blind" taste-testing panel of 10 journalists and food critics. The L.A. sample was selected by the Metropolitan Water District's (MWD) flavor analysis panel and came from the Joseph Jensen Water Treatment Plant in Granada Hills, in northwestern Los Angeles.

This award winning water started its journey in Northern California's Sierra Nevada Mountains and traveled about 500 miles through the State Water Project aqueducts, pumps and transmission lines. Once it reached the Jensen plant, it was treated with state-of-the-art ozone gas and given a small shot of chlorine as a preservative just prior to leaving the plant.

The Jensen plant supplies MWD customer water agencies in Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange counties, where it is usually blended with local well water before reaching the consumer. In other MWD service counties, in addition to well water, it may also be blended with Colorado River water or water from the Owens Valley aqueduct.

This year's tasty water contest included entrants from 21 municipalities across 10 states, eight Canadian cities, and Putaruru, New Zealand. The silver medal was shared this year by another Calif. desert city, Desert Hot Springs, and the Village of Montrose, B.C.

Entry samples were judged based on four criteria: taste, odor, clarity, and, oddly enough, texture. It would seem that all the entrants would score maximum points in this latter category since they are all "wet," but I'm guessing that texture might be another word for hardness.

What's amazing about this tasty glass of water is the system from which it originated. The State Water Project supplies 23 million Californians and 755,000 acres of farmland. The MWD itself serves 18 million of these people and 91,400 farm acres.

Equally as amazing is the age of this system. In the early 1900s the population in Southern California was growing rapidly, and demand was quickly exceeding supply. The first solution to L.A.'s water problem was the 238-mile aqueduct from the Owens River Valley. This project was designed and orchestrated by legendary chief engineer William Mulholland and was completed in 1913. Many of you may recall the 1974 movie Chinatown, in which Mulholland was fictitiously portrayed by the characters Hollis Mulwray (a partial anagram) and Noah Cross - Noah of course being a reference to a flood and Cross a reference to Mulholland's alter ego.

In the movie, Mulwray opposes Cross's desire to build a dam, since Mulwray's previous failed design ended in the death of hundreds. In reality, Mulholland's design of the St. Francis Dam failed in 1928, killing more than 600 people and ending his career.

Prior to this disaster, 13 cities banded together, following Mulholland's lead in the Owens Valley aqueduct project, to build another aqueduct, this one from the Colorado River to Los Angeles. Under the leadership of Pasadena mayor Hiram Wadsworth, the MWD was incorporated in 1928. After considering nearly 100 design alternatives, the project finally began in 1933. The aqueduct started on the California side of the Colorado River at Parker, Ariz., and crossed 150 miles of scorching desert and 92 miles of mountainous terrain. One 13-mile tunnel in San Jacinto took six years to build and has been named a National Engineering Historic Landmark and one of the engineering marvels of the modern world by ASCE. The project was completed and put into service in 1941.

Since these early achievements, the MWD has continued to develop new strategies to ensure a continual, high quality water supply for Southern California. Ozone was already mentioned and is being implemented in all five of the MWD treatment plants. Desalination research continually examines methods to improve the performance and cost effectiveness of desalting facilities.

Water quality monitoring and applied research data by the water quality laboratory and staff has created guidelines for current and emerging contaminants. Enhanced threat evaluation, identification tools and analytical methods have been implemented to protect the water supply from intentional contamination.

In an effort to reduce dependence on the Colorado River, the MWD has recently developed more than 520 billion gallons of storage capacity in groundwater basins and reservoirs. Over half of this volume is stored in the massive Diamond Valley Lake, a manmade high-tech lake constructed between 1995 and 2000. This one lake holds enough water to serve more than 1.6 million households for an entire year. It connects to the State Water Project via 44 miles of pipe tunnels that were drilled 19 feet in diameter by laser guided, 400-foot long custom-built drilling machines.

All told, the capacity and facilities of the MWD are staggering. It serves an area of 5,200 square miles with water from two sources that travels through 775 miles of pipelines. It has five major pumping plants, five treatment plants and nine reservoirs totaling 350 trillion gallons. There are 16 hydroelectric plants with a combined capacity of 127 megawatts. Record service delivery was on June 28, 1994, when the MWD supplied more than 3.2 billion gallons of water in one day. And last but not least, the cost of this tasty, voluminous amount of water? About 0.17 cents per gallon for treated water and 0.12 cents per gallon for untreated water. Quite a bargain in the middle of a desert, don't you agree? And it is superior in quality to a lot of the bottled water you might purchase for $1 a pint - more than 2,300 times the cost of Los Angeles tap.

That said, the less glamorous reality is that the water most people consume in So Cal is far from excellent. This is a result of the earlier referenced blending by local agencies. The well water and aqueduct water added to the MWD water (presumably to reduce both cost and consumption of the MWD product) dramatically reduce quality. In fact, the water that comes from my own fixtures is as hard as rocks and wreaks havoc on all the fixtures and appliances it touches. But I am very glad to have it in this desert-turned-paradise.

Note. Since I wrote this article, the Associated Press released information about test results for pharmaceuticals in the water supply of 28 major water providers that test their water voluntarily. All but three found traces of various drugs. Philadelphia tipped the scales with 56 different pharmaceuticals, ranging from pain relievers to mental illness drugs. The tasty water of the MWD had anti-anxiety meds (perhaps that's why they won the gold medal). San Francisco, ironically, had sex hormones in its water.

How do these drugs get into the water supply? The unused portion that our bodies don't metabolize goes down the toilet and eventually gets into the ground water. This also happens when people flush expired meds. Stranger than this is the presence of the growth hormone trenbolone given to cattle as ear implants (the same steroid used by body builders): 10 percent passes through the animals and into local waterways. In Nebraska, water sampled downstream of a feedlot tested positive for high levels of the steroid. The male fathead minnows in the area had low testosterone levels and small heads. Imagine the stigma of that - to be a fathead minnow with a small head!

Not to fear though. Experts say that the drug levels in the tested water were so small (parts per billion or trillion) that you would have to drink the volume of an Olympic swimming pool in one day to get the equivalent of one prescribed dose. Other experts, however, worry about the prolonged effect of multiple drugs, even in trace amounts, over an extended period of time.

Timothy Allinson is a Senior Professional Engineer with Murray Company, Mechanical Contractors, in Long Beach, Calif. Prior to entering the design-build industry he worked for Popov Engineers, Inc. in Irvine, Calif, and JB&B in New York City. Tim holds a BSME from Tufts University and an MBA from New York University. He is a professional engineer licensed in both mechanical and fire protection engineering in various states, and is a leed Accredited Professional. Tim is a past-president of ASPE, both the New York and Orange County Chapters, and sits on the board of the Society of American Military Engineers, Orange County Post.