A joint venture of Jacobs and McCarthy has won a $160m contract to improve groundwater desalination capacity in southern California, where over-extraction of groundwater in the first half of the 20th Century led to seawater contamination inland.
The client is the Water Replenishment District (WRD), a groundwater agency serving 4 million people in southern Los Angeles County, including part of the City of Los Angeles.
Jacobs and McCarthy will expand the Robert W. Goldsworthy Desalter Facility so it can provide up to 9 million more gallons of drinking water a day to the 88,000 residents of the city of Torrance by 2027.
The upgrade will deploy nano filtration and reverse osmosis membrane technology to remove salts from the extracted groundwater.
The work includes building new groundwater extraction wells and raw water pipelines.
The contract is part of WRD’s “Brackish Groundwater Reclamation Program”, which aims to address aquifers made salty by unregulated pumping prior to 1959, when WRD was founded.
The unregulated pumping depleted the fresh water table to below sea level, allowing nearby seawater to seep in.
“As water resources in the West are increasingly strained, advanced water treatment technologies are providing excellent solutions for communities like Torrance to ensure a sustainable and resilient water supply,” said McCarthy’s Water Group vice president Sagrado Sparks.
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