Just Say No To A Desalination Plant In HB

By Joey J. Racano

Its a bad idea! Here's why-

Case in point: A half-baked plan to build the largest desalination plant in the country in southeast Huntington Beach.

As a person who tries to stay involved in local water quality issues, I have gone to the trouble of attending several meetings held by Posieden, the would be builder of this nightmare waiting to happen, as well as studying the EIR they have put forth.

Let me be the first to debunk the myth that we need the water.

As I write this letter, many gallons of water are being wasted, and I have no reason to believe that, were we to procure more water from the desalination process, we wouldn't waste that as well!

Further, the Orange County Sanitation District currently dumps 243 million gallons of effluent each day out their 'outfall' pipe.

Over 99% of this discharge is water, ripe for full reclaimation.

To those nay sayers who think the public wouldn't drink reclaimed waste water (it's a 'perception problem'), may I point out that here in our area, we already drink from the Santa Ana River, which is made up by and large of treated wastewater from sanitation districts upstream of the Prado Dam.

Further, it is easier to clean wastewater than ocean water.

And what about the briney discharge? Posieden plans to dump the discharge into the ocean out an 'outfall tower', and the 500' surrounding area is projected to be 10% above background salinity. Just imagine what this area would look like after a few years of this. Don't be fooled into thinking this is table salt, either. Brine is full of many salts, some quite poisonous to living creatures- and it also contains the many dissolved metals in ocean water as well. Nasty stuff, to be sure.

Building this expensive and destructive plant will lock us into a primitive way of dealing with our coastal environment for many years to come, discouraging the full reclaimation of the OCSD Sewage 'plume', using the ocean as a garbage pail for 'micro filter return' (toxic waste from the dirty filter), allowing the AES power generating station to continue to operate an environmentally destructive intake and outflow when they should be purchasing OCSD effluent to cool equipment (this is already being done in Casa Grande, Arizona, creating a $200,000 annual windfall for that city!).

There are alternatives that make a lot more sense, such as S.A.N.D. Plan, my 5 point 100 year Clean water action plan, available for scrutiny at http://www.littleshell.org.

Just say no to desalination in Huntington Beach.

Respectfully,

Joey Racano

Joey Racano 2323 Huntington St, Huntington Beach, Ca 92648

joeylittleshell@yahoo.co (714) 407-1017