Council Approves Lake Nacimiento Water Recovery Well
Paso Robles City Council gives go-ahead for $245,000 construction contract
Article By Heather Youg
At their Sept. 2 meeting, members of the Paso Robles City Council passed approval for the city to enter into a contract for $245,149 to construct a recover well for Lake Nacimiento water. The project would add a shallow well at the Thunderbird well field that will be used as a drought mitigation measure and to process additional drinking water.
According to a staff report issued by the Pas Robles Public Works Department, the addition of the well – the fifth shall well at the well field – 90 percent of the recharge can be recovered under optimal conditions. The city injects surplus water from the Nacimiento pipeline into the field and then recovers it with the wells.
“We’re just adding a well to that field and adding water,” Paso Robles Water Resources Manager Christopher Alakel said. “It’ll act as frought buffer and allow us to increase our annual intake of Lake Nacimiento water.”
The City’s current water treatment plant, Alakel said, can only treat a fraction of the annual amount it obtains from lake Nacimiento. The added recovery well will allow for more water to be treated, giving Paso RObles access to additional amounts of water. He said construction will be completed by mid December with full use predicted by the end of March 2015.
“These shallow wells regenerate themselves very quickly with rainfal,” Alakel siad.
The recover well will be 150 feet deep and will be utilized in dry season when the native underflow is lacking. It was determined that the additional flows from the new recovery well would require modifications of the water treatment high-service pump station and a shared water main. The Nacimiento Water Treatment Plant will have a capacity of 2.4 millin gallons per day.
At its prak, Pas Robles can receive up to 7.14 million gallons per dat. With the new treatment plant, the city will have the capacity for an additional 3,290 gallons per minute of water during the summer season. According to the pres release, during dry years, the citys underflow-enhancement infrastructre will allow for percolating through the soil up to 3,000 gallons per minute of Nacimiento water into the Salinas River with up to 90 percent of the percolated waterrecovered via underflow wells, which will greatly enhance water-system reliability.
Source: Paso Robles Daily News
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