AUTHOR

Brown and Caldwell

Related Topics

Water Security

Water Recycling

Climate Change

_{Courtesy of Brown and Caldwell with collaboration with City of Los Angeles / LA Sanitation & Environment. (c) 2024, Brown and Caldwell. All Rights Reserved. Used with permission}

For the past 100 years, the City of Santa Monica’s Arcadia Water Treatment Plant has been providing the primary source of drinking water. It currently serves 93,000 residents and more than 2,700 commercial customers as well as over half a million tourists during the day who are visiting Santa Monica’s world-famous beaches and boardwalk in Southern California.

THE CHALLENGE

Needing an immediate solution to reduce the City of Santa Monica’s reliance on imported water, develop sustainable water supplies, and increase groundwater production all during unprecedented working conditions in a pandemic; saying this was a challenging project is an understatement. With the odds stacked against them, the tenacious project team, including Walsh Construction, was committed to finding and delivering the best solution and innovating along the way. The finished $72 million Arcadia WTP expansion has increased treatment capacity with a novel high recovery reverse osmosis system, producing more finished drinking water with less waste discharged to the sewer. A win-win for the City and the environment.

THE SOLUTION

The City enhanced its current reverse osmosis system by incorporating the innovative Flow Reversal Reverse Osmosis (FRRO) technology, a first of its kind in the United States. This innovation boosted production efficiency from 80% to 90% or higher, generating more high-quality drinking water using the same volume of raw groundwater and reducing overall groundwater demand.​ As a part of the Arcadia WTP expansion to increase treatment capacity, the team also designed and built the new Olympic Advanced Water Treatment Facility (AWTF) to add a drinking water source to the plant and to protect public health by cleaning up the contaminated Olympic Well Field groundwater.

RESULTS

The Arcadia WTP Expansion is the last major project for the City that gets them closer to their 100% water self-sufficiency goal. The new AWTF taps into their groundwater from their Olympic Well Field, no longer needing to worry about water quality due to industrial contamination. City leadership saw the need to be more sustainable 30 years ago, and with these upgrades they are now at the forefront of deploying sustainable water infrastructure projects in Southern California.