First published in the Oct. 8 print issue of the Glendale News-Press.
Between Glendale Water and Power’s customers and the city’s own operations, the Jewel City saved nearly 80 million gallons of water from the state’s emergency supplies during the recent shutoff of access to the Colorado River to facilitate a pipeline repair.
According to GWP officials, residential customers reduced their water usage during the repair window by around 40% to conserve around 36 million gallons of water while the city was drawing from the state water project, with the city pitching in for the rest. The last time the city urged residents to conserve water, those customers reduced usage by 24%. The bulk of this saved water was likely realized through customers who ceased watering their lawns and otherwise using irrigation during the shutoff period, from Sept. 6-18. (The original period ran through Sept. 20, but repair crews finished two days early.)
Prior to the shutoff, GWP was purchasing around 12,600 gallons of water per minute from the Metropolitan Water District, which sources from the Colorado River. That dropped to around 2,700 gallons per minute, according to GWP.
“It was a really big impact and it took a lot of effort both from residents and our staff,” Michael de Ghetto, the assistant GWP director in charge of water, told the City Council last week. “It worked out really successfully.”
MWD planned to temporarily cut off water supply for the 15-day window after discovering a leak in its pipeline earlier this year. In addition the Glendale, the agency supplies water for much of the Los Angeles metro area, and the closures forced those customers to tap into the state’s emergency water reserve that it normally conserves for the most at-risk communities and customers.
Because of that, MWD urged those customers to curb water use in whatever way they could, most effectively by completely turning off irrigation systems used to water lawns and gardens. Cities such as Glendale had already implemented restrictions to limit such watering to two days a week, on account of the continuing drought.
One way the city prepared for the shutdown was by filling its many reservoirs more full than usual while MWD still drew from the Colorado River. The city secured permission to do this, on the basis that it would use less of the emergency water.
“We’ve been very fortunate to have extremely large reservoirs. They’re uncommonly large. We don’t keep them full normally,” said GWP Director Mark Young in an interview. “We were taking more water, filling up the reservoirs so that when the outage occurred, we didn’t need to take water from that source and others could.
“We were able to reduce the water use tremendously,” he added. “Between overcharging our reservoirs and having the customers reduce their consumption, we were able to survive and actually help other cities meet their water need.”
De Ghetto also dove into more long-term water saving data last week.
From 2006 to 2013, Glendale posted a 15% overall reduction in water use. Additionally, the three-year average of water use between 2017 and 2020 was 29% less than the amount in 2006. De Ghetto pointed out that since 2006, Glendale has added around 3,000 housing units to its stock.
“Even adding more housing, we’re using less water than we did,” he told the council.
Since it began to offer them in 2008, GWP has awarded nearly 4,500 rebates to residential customers for purchasing water-saving equipment like toilets, washing machines and drip irrigation, representing around $280,000 paid out to those residents. More than $1 million in similar rebates have been paid out to commercial customers since 2013.
Since 2014, the city has paid out $1.4 million in turf-replacement rebates to 480 residential customers who have collectively removed 732,000 square feet of grass from their properties, replacing them with drought-tolerant and native foliage. Commercial customers, including the city on its properties, have received around $3.4 million in rebates for removing 1.7 million square feet of turf.
Additionally, using recycled water has helped save 14.5 billion gallons of MWD-purchased water, de Ghetto said.
Long term, Young was hesitant to expect customers to continue their recent water reduction, which did not last long enough to kill an otherwise adequately maintained lawn. He also observed that residential water use represents a minuscule amount of the state’s water use when compared to farmland irrigation, so this would be unlikely to help out the state’s dwindling lake reservoirs.
“We couldn’t do that for a long time, because everybody’s grass would die, but for a short period of time, we didn’t water our grass, so that was the savings,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a long-term play.”
