Los Angeles Still Owing on Owens Lake Project
Dust suppression in the dry lake is taking more time and money than originally projected.
Each time Los Angelenos open their water faucets, someone in the Owens Lake region sneezes. That’s perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not by much: A good percentage of the water the city uses comes from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was created by diverting the Owens River away from the lake. This diversion began in 1913; 13 years later, Owens Lake was dry.
“One hundred years ago, Owens Lake was one of California’s largest lakes—110 square miles,” says Ted Schade, air pollution control officer for the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District (GBUAPCD), which encompasses Inyo, Mono, and Alpine counties. “The growing city of Los Angeles said, ‘We need some more water; we’ll buy the land around Owens Lake and take that water, since no one lives in that area.’ They then built an aqueduct 250 miles long and diverted all the fresh water that was the lake’s source to the city. Owens was a salt lake—mainly sulfate- and carbonate-salt instead of sodium chloride. Whatever water flowed in evaporated and left the salts. When the wind blows like crazy here, as it often does, that salt is blown over a wide area.”
According to the US Geological Survey, Owens Lake’s dry bed has produced vast amounts of fine-grained alkaline dust ever since; it’s probably the nation’s largest single source of PM10 dust. As well as the dust itself being an inhalation hazard, trace metals, such as arsenic, can be found in the particulates.
“As these particulates are anthropogenic, or man-created, pollution, the federal and state EPAs mandate this kind of air pollution must be controlled,” Schade says. “In 1998 the GBUAPCD made a plan that said Los Angeles must fix the lake by the end of 2006, and the time has come. The whole lakebed isn’t a salt problem, just the shallow edges, which leaves 30 to 40 square miles L.A. has to work with.
“We told L.A., ‘There are three measures you can choose from to clean up Owens Lake. You can cover the affected parts with water, with plants, or with gravel,’” he continues. “Right now they’re doing shallow flooding, only putting water in the areas that blow around the most. Three square miles of the 30 to be completed by 2007 have plants; 27 square miles will get shallow flooding. We’re going to see how this goes before the final 10 square miles are dealt with.”
Three Possible Solutions
How did the GBUAPCD come up with those three choices to solve the Owens Lake problem? “We created very small-scale—10- by 10-foot—test plots. However, for the vegetation test, some plots were as large as 20 to 40 acres. We also made a 300-acre test plot for flooding, to cull through the possibilities,” Schade explains.
“The solution for Owens Lake came after many years of disagreement—could anything be done to solve the problem, and was L.A. responsible for it? Most of the initial suggested solutions were not very promising,” says Richard Harasick, program director for Los Angeles’s Owens Lake dust mitigation program. “In 1998, we signed the agreement that said we’d be responsible for dust abatement. Our initial steps were budgeted at $120 million, but the project was open-ended. Initially, we were required to work on 22 square miles, but now we have to clean up 29.8 square miles, so right there we knew the costs would have to go up. In addition, our initial cost didn’t include planning, design, and any costs incurred to ensure we met regulations. We had to revise our budgets as we went along with the project. The dust abatement is being constructed in phases. The first phase entailed 13.5 square miles, at a cost of $62 million.”
 |
| The 110-square-mile Owens Lake Bed dried up in the 1920s. |
Early on, it was decided that covering dusty areas with gravel was not the best option. “Gravel is very labor intensive. You have to mine it, haul it, and spread it all. Plus the capital costs of gravel are expensive, although there’s lots of gravel around here,” Schade says.
“Four square miles of plantings and gravel—these are huge areas—how could we put all that gravel on it?” Harasick asks. “All those trucks, stirring up the dust, and some [area residents] wouldn’t want us cutting into the side of a mountain to make gravel. Plus, there’s not a lot of research on how well gravel performs, either. Flooding also seemed a better option versus planting salt grass, which takes a number of years to grow, and we didn’t think we could have the grass established enough by 2006. All things considered, we were more comfortable with the shallow flooding dust abatement plan.”
Water: the Question and the Answer
“Right now the water is easier to work with,” Schade admits. “As the dusty areas are all along the shoreline, if you’d just dump water into the lake, it would go right to the deepest part and then you’d need all the water to accomplish the job. Using big berms or low dams around the areas to be flooded will keep the water in. Actually, the areas that need the most abatement are not very deep, ranging from a couple of inches to 18 inches. Think of this like flooding a basketball court.”
 |
| Owens Valley has 14,000-foot peaks on both sides. |
Where’s the water going to come from? “L.A. is going to ‘undivert’ some of its water—about 15% to 20%—back into Owens Lake,” Schade says. “Luckily, the city uses its water pretty wisely. There’s widespread use of low-flow toilets and garden Xeriscaping. In fact, L.A. uses about the same amount of water as it did in the 1970s and ’80s, even though its population is much higher now.”
Will diversion cause water shortages for L.A. citizens? “Water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct is being used for the project,” says Harasick. “If need be, we will have to purchase water from Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s water wholesaler. We will look at additional water sources we have and look at purchasing water elsewhere. Maybe we can pump for water under Owens Lake. In the future, can we maybe do the diversion more efficiently and not use as much water?”
“There are competing needs for any water you have,” Schade points out. “The city of Los Angeles is fed by three aqueducts—the L.A., the Colorado, and the California. Everyone else in southern California gets their water from the last two sources; only L.A. uses the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Colorado, Arizona, and Utah want to claim more of the Colorado River water for themselves, rather than letting it travel on to California. At some point, California will likely be desalinating the ocean for water—although I have no idea when this will be online. Test plants are under way, but the technology needs to mature.”
Surprisingly enough, during the hot summer months, no extra water will have to be added to the lake. “We live in the deepest valley in the country,” says Schade. “It’s 2 miles deep, and it runs north and south. Because of the mountains, we don’t get many west winds. We don’t get a lot of wind during July, August, and September—it’s hot and windless here. We project we’ll need wet areas in Owens Lake only from October until the end of June.”
The Burgeoning Budget
“This has become a bigger job than L.A. thought it would be. There were no other comparable projects by which to estimate it—nothing like this has been done before,” Schade says. “Sorry about the cost, but the city has to fix it.”
 |
| Dust from the lake travel miles through the Mojave Desert. |
Why is it so expensive? The average layperson likely imagines a giant spigot at Owens Lake, to be opened and closed. “It’s more complicated than that,” Harasick explains. “Diverting water from the aqueduct to bring it to the lake entails a series of computer-controlled valves and pumps. Sensors monitor conditions so we know what water we’re losing in evaporation. We have to modify the amount of water each day based upon humidity and other factors. We have a building on the site for our staff; about 60 people will run this project and maintain the site. Berms have to be built to keep the water where it’s supposed to be, and we also had to build a whole network of roads to get to the site, as well as make allowances for environmental concerns for migratory birds—there are always issues like that popping up.”
Why is the project taking so long to complete? “I wouldn’t characterize the speed as delays,” Harasick says. “Part of the 1998 agreement was that the GBUAPCD would look to secure a deadline extension to 2006. In ’98, the GBUAPCD said they would do a 2003 State Implementation Plan [SIP], and that’s when we would find out exactly what amount of work was due. In late 2002 we were developing budgets and knew where it was heading—the new budget was $415 million.”
There’s some disagreement on the size of the project. The GBUAPCD’s figures indicate 40 square miles must be mitigated; Harasick’s totals are a bit lower. “We determined 29.8 square miles is the total; 4 square miles is vegetation, and the rest will be shallow-flooded.”
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According to an October 2005 status report, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) had spent $304 million on the Owens Lake program. A $103.2 million contract was announced in November 2005: “This was for the final phase of construction, which included 6.7 square miles of new shallow-flood dust control and 4.5 square miles of redone shallow-flood dust control. We found it was better to reconstruct or upgrade the margins that we had done before,” Harasick says.
That same status report pointed out that although initially undefined, the scope of work ordered by the District (GBUAPCD) has been reduced, through efforts of LADWP, to an amount substantially below their initial order resulting in a savings of $70 million in capital costs. LADWP has additionally secured a method by which the total amount of expenditures and replacement water may be reduced. … The District adopted a revised SIP in November 2003. The revised SIP defines the additional specific boundaries and required areas to be controlled on the lakebed. From the beginning of the formation of the District’s revised SIP, LADWP tasked its air modeling experts to verify and validate every bit of data, every computer model run, and every decision point by the District along the way. In effect, LADWP followed the District’s every step. This shadow analysis, as it has come to be known, was very successful in different ways. First, some basic as well as highly esoteric mistakes or misapplication of data were uncovered that, if left uncorrected, would have resulted in the District defining a larger dust source area to be controlled. Key points that were negotiated with the District included the total amount of area in square miles that the City is required to control by the end of 2006. This is the ‘cap’ that did not exist when the City agreed in 1998 to solve the problem. In adopting the 2003 revised SIP, the District is certifying to the USEPA they believe that if the City controls the 29.8 square miles they ordered, Owens Lake will come into attainment with the Federal air quality standards. This amount is 15 percent less than what the District had originally sought in 1998 and resulted in a savings of nearly $70 million.
March-April 2006
Los Angeles Still Owing on Owens Lake Project
Dust suppression in the dry lake is taking more time and money than originally projected.
Each time Los Angelenos open their water faucets, someone in the Owens Lake region sneezes. That’s perhaps a slight exaggeration, but not by much: A good percentage of the water the city uses comes from the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which was created by diverting the Owens River away from the lake. This diversion began in 1913; 13 years later, Owens Lake was dry.“One hundred years ago, Owens Lake was one of California’s largest lakes—110 square miles,” says Ted Schade, air pollution control officer for the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District (GBUAPCD), which encompasses Inyo, Mono, and Alpine counties. “The growing city of Los Angeles said, ‘We need some more water; we’ll buy the land around Owens Lake and take that water, since no one lives in that area.’ They then built an aqueduct 250 miles long and diverted all the fresh water that was the lake’s source to the city. Owens was a salt lake—mainly sulfate- and carbonate-salt instead of sodium chloride. Whatever water flowed in evaporated and left the salts. When the wind blows like crazy here, as it often does, that salt is blown over a wide area.”
According to the US Geological Survey, Owens Lake’s dry bed has produced vast amounts of fine-grained alkaline dust ever since; it’s probably the nation’s largest single source of PM10 dust. As well as the dust itself being an inhalation hazard, trace metals, such as arsenic, can be found in the particulates.
“As these particulates are anthropogenic, or man-created, pollution, the federal and state EPAs mandate this kind of air pollution must be controlled,” Schade says. “In 1998 the GBUAPCD made a plan that said Los Angeles must fix the lake by the end of 2006, and the time has come. The whole lakebed isn’t a salt problem, just the shallow edges, which leaves 30 to 40 square miles L.A. has to work with.
“We told L.A., ‘There are three measures you can choose from to clean up Owens Lake. You can cover the affected parts with water, with plants, or with gravel,’” he continues. “Right now they’re doing shallow flooding, only putting water in the areas that blow around the most. Three square miles of the 30 to be completed by 2007 have plants; 27 square miles will get shallow flooding. We’re going to see how this goes before the final 10 square miles are dealt with.”
Three Possible Solutions
How did the GBUAPCD come up with those three choices to solve the Owens Lake problem? “We created very small-scale—10- by 10-foot—test plots. However, for the vegetation test, some plots were as large as 20 to 40 acres. We also made a 300-acre test plot for flooding, to cull through the possibilities,” Schade explains.
“The solution for Owens Lake came after many years of disagreement—could anything be done to solve the problem, and was L.A. responsible for it? Most of the initial suggested solutions were not very promising,” says Richard Harasick, program director for Los Angeles’s Owens Lake dust mitigation program. “In 1998, we signed the agreement that said we’d be responsible for dust abatement. Our initial steps were budgeted at $120 million, but the project was open-ended. Initially, we were required to work on 22 square miles, but now we have to clean up 29.8 square miles, so right there we knew the costs would have to go up. In addition, our initial cost didn’t include planning, design, and any costs incurred to ensure we met regulations. We had to revise our budgets as we went along with the project. The dust abatement is being constructed in phases. The first phase entailed 13.5 square miles, at a cost of $62 million.”
|
| The 110-square-mile Owens Lake Bed dried up in the 1920s. |
Early on, it was decided that covering dusty areas with gravel was not the best option. “Gravel is very labor intensive. You have to mine it, haul it, and spread it all. Plus the capital costs of gravel are expensive, although there’s lots of gravel around here,” Schade says.
“Four square miles of plantings and gravel—these are huge areas—how could we put all that gravel on it?” Harasick asks. “All those trucks, stirring up the dust, and some [area residents] wouldn’t want us cutting into the side of a mountain to make gravel. Plus, there’s not a lot of research on how well gravel performs, either. Flooding also seemed a better option versus planting salt grass, which takes a number of years to grow, and we didn’t think we could have the grass established enough by 2006. All things considered, we were more comfortable with the shallow flooding dust abatement plan.”
Water: the Question and the Answer
“Right now the water is easier to work with,” Schade admits. “As the dusty areas are all along the shoreline, if you’d just dump water into the lake, it would go right to the deepest part and then you’d need all the water to accomplish the job. Using big berms or low dams around the areas to be flooded will keep the water in. Actually, the areas that need the most abatement are not very deep, ranging from a couple of inches to 18 inches. Think of this like flooding a basketball court.”
|
| Owens Valley has 14,000-foot peaks on both sides. |
Where’s the water going to come from? “L.A. is going to ‘undivert’ some of its water—about 15% to 20%—back into Owens Lake,” Schade says. “Luckily, the city uses its water pretty wisely. There’s widespread use of low-flow toilets and garden Xeriscaping. In fact, L.A. uses about the same amount of water as it did in the 1970s and ’80s, even though its population is much higher now.”
Will diversion cause water shortages for L.A. citizens? “Water from the Los Angeles Aqueduct is being used for the project,” says Harasick. “If need be, we will have to purchase water from Metropolitan Water District, Southern California’s water wholesaler. We will look at additional water sources we have and look at purchasing water elsewhere. Maybe we can pump for water under Owens Lake. In the future, can we maybe do the diversion more efficiently and not use as much water?”
“There are competing needs for any water you have,” Schade points out. “The city of Los Angeles is fed by three aqueducts—the L.A., the Colorado, and the California. Everyone else in southern California gets their water from the last two sources; only L.A. uses the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Colorado, Arizona, and Utah want to claim more of the Colorado River water for themselves, rather than letting it travel on to California. At some point, California will likely be desalinating the ocean for water—although I have no idea when this will be online. Test plants are under way, but the technology needs to mature.”
Surprisingly enough, during the hot summer months, no extra water will have to be added to the lake. “We live in the deepest valley in the country,” says Schade. “It’s 2 miles deep, and it runs north and south. Because of the mountains, we don’t get many west winds. We don’t get a lot of wind during July, August, and September—it’s hot and windless here. We project we’ll need wet areas in Owens Lake only from October until the end of June.”
The Burgeoning Budget
“This has become a bigger job than L.A. thought it would be. There were no other comparable projects by which to estimate it—nothing like this has been done before,” Schade says. “Sorry about the cost, but the city has to fix it.”
|
| Dust from the lake travel miles through the Mojave Desert. |
Why is it so expensive? The average layperson likely imagines a giant spigot at Owens Lake, to be opened and closed. “It’s more complicated than that,” Harasick explains. “Diverting water from the aqueduct to bring it to the lake entails a series of computer-controlled valves and pumps. Sensors monitor conditions so we know what water we’re losing in evaporation. We have to modify the amount of water each day based upon humidity and other factors. We have a building on the site for our staff; about 60 people will run this project and maintain the site. Berms have to be built to keep the water where it’s supposed to be, and we also had to build a whole network of roads to get to the site, as well as make allowances for environmental concerns for migratory birds—there are always issues like that popping up.”
Why is the project taking so long to complete? “I wouldn’t characterize the speed as delays,” Harasick says. “Part of the 1998 agreement was that the GBUAPCD would look to secure a deadline extension to 2006. In ’98, the GBUAPCD said they would do a 2003 State Implementation Plan [SIP], and that’s when we would find out exactly what amount of work was due. In late 2002 we were developing budgets and knew where it was heading—the new budget was $415 million.”
There’s some disagreement on the size of the project. The GBUAPCD’s figures indicate 40 square miles must be mitigated; Harasick’s totals are a bit lower. “We determined 29.8 square miles is the total; 4 square miles is vegetation, and the rest will be shallow-flooded.”
According to an October 2005 status report, the Los Angeles Department of Water & Power (LADWP) had spent $304 million on the Owens Lake program. A $103.2 million contract was announced in November 2005: “This was for the final phase of construction, which included 6.7 square miles of new shallow-flood dust control and 4.5 square miles of redone shallow-flood dust control. We found it was better to reconstruct or upgrade the margins that we had done before,” Harasick says.
That same status report pointed out that although initially undefined, the scope of work ordered by the District (GBUAPCD) has been reduced, through efforts of LADWP, to an amount substantially below their initial order resulting in a savings of $70 million in capital costs. LADWP has additionally secured a method by which the total amount of expenditures and replacement water may be reduced. … The District adopted a revised SIP in November 2003. The revised SIP defines the additional specific boundaries and required areas to be controlled on the lakebed. From the beginning of the formation of the District’s revised SIP, LADWP tasked its air modeling experts to verify and validate every bit of data, every computer model run, and every decision point by the District along the way. In effect, LADWP followed the District’s every step. This shadow analysis, as it has come to be known, was very successful in different ways. First, some basic as well as highly esoteric mistakes or misapplication of data were uncovered that, if left uncorrected, would have resulted in the District defining a larger dust source area to be controlled. Key points that were negotiated with the District included the total amount of area in square miles that the City is required to control by the end of 2006. This is the ‘cap’ that did not exist when the City agreed in 1998 to solve the problem. In adopting the 2003 revised SIP, the District is certifying to the USEPA they believe that if the City controls the 29.8 square miles they ordered, Owens Lake will come into attainment with the Federal air quality standards. This amount is 15 percent less than what the District had originally sought in 1998 and resulted in a savings of nearly $70 million.