On Monday, May 27, the Public Works Department’s Utilities Division received an “Innovative Water-Saving Project” award from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. The City has deployed new technology that eliminates the waste of potable water while cleaning the City’s potable water system. Sand often gets into the pipelines of the City’s potable water wells and requires cleaning the pipelines. The City’s old system for handling this cleaning was to open fire hydrants and allow water to flow into the streets at a high velocity to flush the sand from the pipeline. The City’s new technology involves flowing water through a system of filters, which removes the sand and returns the filtered water to potable water pipelines. This new methodology will save an estimated 186,000,000 gallons of water over a 10-year period.

More information on this process if available on YouTube.