In just a few short weeks, when residents on the west side of Hollister turn on their faucets, they will be receiving water from a new source. They may not even realize the water is cleaner, softer, and better tasting than what they’re accustomed to. The water will be coming down from the brand new, $24.5-million West Hills Water Treatment Plant nestled in the hills between Riverside and Union roads, just across from San Justo Reservoir.
Donald Ridenhour, general manager of the Sunnyslope County Water District, recently gave BenitoLink an exclusive walking tour of the highly-automated facility. Also along for the tour were Hollister City Manager Bill Avera and Shawn Novack, director of the Water Resources Association of San Benito County.
Ridenhour said the plant ties into the Hollister Conduit—a pipeline built in 1988 that curves along underground beside Union Road—at the bottom of a dirt road just past San Justo Road. There’s a new pumping station there to push “raw water” up the hill, but the facility also will be supplied by “gravity water” coming from nearby San Justo Reservoir or from the San Luis Reservoir.
The plant is designed to treat imported surface water (water pumped from reservoirs vs. groundwater, which comes from wells). Ridenhour said the plant will initially serve the western part of Hollister, but there are expansion plans to add water to the Sunnyslope County Water District.
“This plant will be able to produce up to 4.5 million gallons a day,” he said. “We’ll run it on average about 2 ¼ to 2 million gallons a day. During the summer, we can ramp up production. We’ll run it based on how much water supply we have in any given year.”
Ridenhour said construction of the plant, which began in Sept. 2015, is about five months ahead of schedule. He attributed this to the contractor’s skill and efficiency. He said during the first year of construction, the drought helped crews keep working year-round. The $24.5 million cost is being shared by the city of Hollister, as well as the Sunnyslope County Water District and San Benito County Water District.
At its most basic capability, the plant takes raw water coming through brown-colored pipes from the reservoirs, eliminates contaminants and pumps it out through blue pipes as drinking water. To do this, a number of chemicals, filtering systems, carbon and fine sand are used to treat the water. An acid is added to adjust the pH factor of the water (pH indicates the acidity of the water, but is actually a measurement of the potential activity of hydrogen ions). Sodium hydroxide or Caustic sodium removes iron and manganese. Chlorine is the last chemical added to the water to kill disease-causing pathogens, such as bacteria, viruses, and protozoans. Strainers located where the water first enters the plant remove larger contaminants. Because the water is coming from reservoirs, contaminants can be anything from dirt to organic matter, such as wood, and even fish.
One message that Novack has been attempting to get across to residents for some time is that they no longer need to use water softeners in their homes. The new plant will add to the various water districts’ efforts to eliminate the need for the expensive and salt-using equipment.
“We’re starting with a lot better water by adding surface water,” Novack said. “The hardness is a lot less with surface water, so by blending that with ground water, better quality water will go into people’s homes.”
Novack also said that while the water coming out of the plant doesn’t eliminate the exact same amount of particulates, 0 to 5 grams per gallon, as a water softener does, it’s pretty close.
Initially, the surface water from the plant will be blended with the groundwater going to western Hollister because officials don’t want to shock the pipes, which have been handling one water source for years and there is a build-up or a coating in them. A sudden surge of an entirely new source of water could cause some of the build-up to break free, which could temporarily plug the fine mesh screens on faucets. That may not happen, Avera said, but officials don’t want people to be overly concerned should the flow from faucets slow down. Also, for a while, there may be a slight color or odor, which Avera wanted to make sure everyone understood is normal and no cause for alarm.
“Some people may notice it tastes different,” Ridenhour said. “It will always be blended with some groundwater. We’ll start slow, so we have more groundwater than surface water. As we get more surface water blended, customers will notice a better taste. They’ll also notice they don’t get the spots on glass if they don’t have water softeners. If they have water softeners, they’re not going to notice it so much.”
Novack said that because better quality water will be provided to homes, better wastewater quality will be coming out, which will improve recycled water for agriculture.
Ridenhour said the plant was designed to have a small footprint, but future expansions were taken into consideration. Because the plant is highly automated, it only requires one or two people to monitor its operation.
Once the plant is online, Ridenhour said water users will not see an associated rate increase because they’ve been paying for it all along since 2013.
“We hired a consultant to look at our finances and all these projects we saw coming to develop rates for the city and Sunnyslope,” he said. “Then we implemented them in anticipation of this project and others down the road.”
Avera said normal rate increases for the city are added each January. Ridenhour said Sunnyslope has an 11.5 percent increase coming up, followed by a 3 percent increase the following year, which will be the sixth year of increases that were adopted to pay for the projects. There won’t be any more increases for the current batch of projects, but once future projects come to the forefront, they will come with additional rate increases.
“It takes a long time to develop a project,” Ridenhour said. “We’ll be starting on that next phase in the next year or two that will be three to 10 years out.”
Avera reiterated that he wanted residents to understand that the new water will be introduced slowly to the system.
“What I don’t want people to do is be concerned if there happens to be a discoloration or a slight odor because the water is 100 percent safe,” he said. “When you’re adding a new source of water, things change chemically, so the inside of the pipes may have some scale that comes off and we just want people to know it is a new, clean water source and if you notice a drop in water pressure it’s probably just a fact that the screens are getting full and need to be cleaned.”