In the West Coast Basin, where natural recharge is limited, treated wastewater is injected into the aquifer. These spreading grounds also receive wastewater from county-operated treatment plants. The Central Basin benefits from the stormwater captured behind the Whittier Narrows Dam in South El Monte and pumped onto the spreading grounds that flank Washington Boulevard.
Pumpers pay for managing the system, as well as for the water that augments natural recharge of the aquifer. The West Coast Basin adjudication took effect in 1961, the Central Basin in 1965.
They sought court-administered adjudication that confirmed their access to the water and bound them to limits on its extraction.
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How much was determined in a series of court cases brought by the pumpers themselves. And large landowners, public and private water companies and industrial pumpers could mutually agree to an annual limit on the amount of water they took. The aquifer could be recharged, either by spreading stormwater where it naturally sank into the aquifer or by directly injecting water into it. By 1953, groundwater extraction from the Central and West Coast basins reached a high of 331,600 acre-feet of water a year, twice the amount naturally recharging the aquifer from winter rains and spring snowmelt.Ī partial solution came in two parts. Pumpers - particularly petroleum refiners beginning in the 1920s - could take all the water they wanted. (There are other basins of particular importance to Angelenos is the Upper Los Angeles River Area Basin in Tujunga.)Ĭalifornia had no basic law regulating the extraction of groundwater. Low hills formed by the Newport-Inglewood Fault, running from Culver City to Long Beach, split the aquifer into the West Coast Basin and the Central Basin. Its water is in motion beneath the plain west and south of downtown until it flows invisibly into the Pacific Ocean. The Los Angeles aquifer is large and deep. The pet waste, diesel soot and pathogens that every rain sweeps from the county's streets will be invisible in the ebbing tide. Unlike the wastewater that passes through treatment plants, almost none of the daily runoff is processed to remove trash, chemical byproducts and biological contaminants.Īfter a day of rain, the air at the mouths of the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers can smell of petroleum, and the swells in the blue-gray water will bob with plastic bottles and bits of takeout containers. The next day, it's as if it had never rained, and only a discolored band of daily runoff meanders over the floor of the channel. When it rains, water rises quickly in the open channel along Del Amo Boulevard and as quickly disappears eastward into the San Gabriel River. The network is for stormwater, but it also carries the daily runoff from more than 2,000 square miles of watershed. The Los Angeles County Flood Control District manages the network of catch basins, laterals, conduits and channels that puts my doorstep one step away from the open ocean. Where I live is seven miles from the coast, but the sea laps its streets unseen. An estuary of the Pacific Ocean flows between the basketball courts and the picnic shelter in my neighborhood park. My driveway is a spillway washed by surf I've never heard.
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