As part of a week-long celebration of Earth Day, and as the region continues to prepare for a major water shortage, Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster and the Board of Water Commissioners announced last week that the City of Long Beach will save an additional 13 million gallons of water each year by shifting from potable to recycled water for citywide street-sweeping operations. Currently, the city uses precious potable water each year to fill and operate its fleet of sweepers. Long Beach Water has installed the first of many recycled water filling stations, located on Park Avenue, just north of 7th Street, at Recreation Park.
The City of Long Beach is among the very first to take advantage of a recent decision by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board to allow the use of recycled water for sweeping activities. “It’s a progressive move, right in line with our city’s passionate pursuit of a more sustainable future,” said Foster, who hooked the city’s first street sweeper to a new filling station earlier this week. “The water we’ll save with this change is the equivalent of the amount of all the water used by approximately 50 Long Beach families over the course of a year,” he said.
Long Beach has an expansive recycled-water distribution system that enables golf courses, parks, cemeteries and large public landscapes to utilize this water for irrigation, saving hundreds of millions of gallons of potable water every year. According to John Allen, president of the Long Beach Board of Water Commissioners, 12 percent of the city’s demand for water is met with recycled water, a six-percent increase since 2001. “Recycled water use and expansion is among the Water Commission’s top priorities, and that priority is represented in the conversion of our city’s fleet of street sweepers.”
In September 2007, the Long Beach Board of Water Commissioners declared that a water supply shortage for the city of Long Beach is imminent. In making this declaration, the Board activated the city’s Emergency Water Supply Shortage Plan, triggering strict prohibitions on certain outdoor uses of water.
The implementation of the city’s Emergency Water Supply Shortage Plan is necessitated by a rapid depletion of our emergency water supply reserves, below normal precipitation and, most importantly, severe imported water supply constrictions in both Northern California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the Colorado River watershed, resulting in permanent losses to critical imported water supplies to the San Francisco Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.
