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Water treatment plants and sewage treatment plants were built in the United States mainly
after the Second World War, during a time with a lot of building and a lot of investment
in infrastructure and these systems are starting to fall apart. They’re reaching the end
of their useful lifetimes. Couple that with climate change and increased populations and
we’re heading for a real crisis. A crisis where we may not be able to provide enough
water to our cities or where we’re going to be constantly patching these things as
they fall apart. You have to think not about the small changes that we need to get through
next week’s problem, but you have to think about a new system that will be there in ten
or twenty years. The Engineering Research Center is focused in three main areas – the
first area is engineer treatment systems, that is thinking about the treatment plants
that we have and how they could be redesigned to be more efficient using managed natural
systems as part of the treatment process, that is using things like treatment wetlands
and soil and groundwater to improve the quality of water and to store water. And then finally,
research on understanding the institutional frameworks and how to make decisions more
effectively in terms of making a more efficient water system. The way we’d like to try to
go about bringing about change in urban water systems is to show what’s possible and the
way we want to show what’s possible is to work with two regional case studies. Our case
studies are the San Francisco Bay Area and the Colorado Front Range. We want to examine
the current urban water system and how new technologies could slot into different places
within the system and then what the implications of that would be for the economics of how
the systems operate, the aesthetics and environment of those cities and the long term sustainability
of the water system. Historically, when we’ve thought about solving California’s water
problems, we’ve thought about the imported water systems, the water coming off the Sierra
Nevada mountains, the water that’s used in the Central Valley for farming. There may
be another way and that other way to satisfy the demand for water within cities is to find
local water sources through a combination of water recycling, storm water capture and
harvesting and sea water desalination, we may be able to wean our cities off of that
imported water supply, which means ultimately, more water for our rivers and environment
and more water that they can share with agriculture.