Letter: West Basin is providing subpar water to its customers

Dear 2UrbanGirls,

West Basin’s mission statement states: “To provide a safe and reliable supply of high-quality water to the communities we serve.”

Now that the summer is heating up, water usage across the state is increasing, this includes irrigation of public parks, school fields, golf parks, etc. West Basin is committed to providing these facilities high quality water, on paper. For over the last 2 years West Basins main facility Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility has been providing the rate payers with grossly low quality water, more than often violating Title 22 recycled water permit requirements.

This water is poorly treated, more than often of worse quality than the post-treated water Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility receives from LA sanitation’s Hyperion plant. 

This is well known by West Basin staff which has been actively involved in covering up these permit violations in conjunction with the current facility operator, Veolia. Veolia is a private company which runs the facilities operations and maintenance program for West Basin, while West Basin oversees them. Since the inception of the plant in 1993 the contract has never gone out to bid. The rate payers have been getting actively screwed by both West Basin and Veolia. I believe the current 5 year contract is worth ~50 million dollars.

Most of that money has not been invested in the operations and maintenance of the Districts facilities. Instead of fixing issues with the current state of the plant, Veolia has instead opted to saturate the water with gross amounts of chemicals. This includes Ferric chloride, expensive proprietary polymers, hydrated lime, and excessive amounts of bleach. These chemicals are not cheap and are most of the time being actively wasted. 

Veolia staff at Edward C. Little Water Recycling Facility has been actively falsifying water quality reports and instrumentation responsible for gathering water quality information. They are with full knowledge and consent from the chief plant operator, bypassing known controls and providing LA county’s ground water recharge aquifers with water that has failed mechanical integrity tests during the filtration process.

This means this water does not meet state log removal values and can cause serious illness. This is a very serious violation, they achieve this by adding air pressure during the pressure decay testing and artificially decreasing pressure loss- thus tricking the primitive system as a good test. These values are also what are used in reporting log removal values to the regional waterboard. The “offscan” the title-22 compliance meter in SCADA daily whenever turbidity values exceed permit requirements (this is multiple times a day often for hours on end) which artificially lower the 24 hour average. They also “plug” the turbidimeter in the field so solids settle out and they get a better reading. Oftentimes the field grabs report numbers 5 times the immediate maximum permit limit.

I have personally seen a turbidity of 64 ntu coming off the filter beds effluent and have heard from others of higher values seen. The effluent chlorine analyzer has been out of service for the last year, and periodic grabs around the clock are not being performed. They have also failed to fix the two lime silos they have on site and are often, if not always in violation of AQMD permits. Top Golf has often complained but their concerns fall on deaf ears. 

Veolia staff is unqualified to run the facilities, often staffing the facility with unlicensed or trainee operators which are unsupervised. This is in violation of the States Water boards law. The majority of the personnel running control board operations are unsupervised OIT’s, as well as the majority of field operations. All of this is happening under the current chief plant operator’s full consent as well as the current Project manager and Production managers approval. The current contract operator needs to be fully investigated.

Thank you,

Mark Doe, ratepayer