Kind: captions
Language: en
moving water from areas of abundance to
areas of scarcity was the kind of Mega
engineering that made the modern State
of California possible
over 1500 dams
and about 4 000 miles of canals had been
rerouting water across the state for
decades
but the population had exploded
more than tripling since the 1950s
with the system nearing a breaking point
one thing was clear the old engineering
Solutions of the past just weren't going
to sustain us going forward
so they focused on a source flowing
right under their noses
200 million gallons of Wastewater
literally going down the drain every day
but how do you turn the County's dirty
water into something people can actually
drink
it starts at the Orange County sewage
treatment plant
here the largest solids are separated
from the raw sewage
and smaller particles are allowed to
settle to the bottom of enormous tanks
aerating the remaining Wastewater
provides oxygen to pollutant eating
bacteria which process the water to be
clean enough to release into the
environment
for decades the that meant all of the
treated water was pumped several miles
out into the Pacific Ocean
literally tens of millions of gallons a
day just going out to the ocean being
lost essentially could those millions of
gallons be the solution to Orange
County's dwindling aquifer and also make
their system essentially drought proof
we knew that people had done water
recycling they just hadn't done it to a
point where that water could be really
efficiently reintroduced into a
groundwater Basin but we knew it was
possible
today nehal's plant finishes the job
it's a computer-operated system of
airtight tubes and underground pipes
at the heart of the operation is a
process called reverse osmosis where one
thousand horsepower engines push the
water through tightly wrapped membranes
filtering out impurities like
Pharmaceuticals viruses and salts so
this is the end of the process we can
see how the Water started out you can
see everything that was removed
and then you can see the purified water
here that's safe enough to drink
but we'll still go through a couple more
steps after this
foreign
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