A CCWD TOUR
Please come with me
on a tour of the Calaveras County Water District system. The information I am about to give is
accurate to the best of my knowledge, however these statements are mine alone
as one of the five directors, and I do not presume to speak for the district
officially. I am going to start by
taking you to all on a tour of the major facilities which cover all four
corners of the county. I don’t believe
one could cover all these facilities and spend a few minutes at each facility
in only two days. I will use an acronym
for “get in the vehicle and drive” (GIVAD) to shorten up the wording
somewhat. We will start this tour from
the headquarters in San Andreas and end up there again at the end of this tour.
First, GIVAD to the
Copper Water treatment Plant (WTP), which is 23 miles from headquarters via the
slow and windy Poole Station Road. Do a
quick tour of this plant only and don't bother about touring the infrastructure,
tanks, intake pumps and all the other items that go with this plant.
Next, GIVAD and
drive two miles to the Copper Wastewater Treatment Pland (WWTP). Again, do a quick tour of the treatment
plant, but don't bother about the collection system, pumps, sprayfield and
disposal areas, and holding ponds.
From here drive 34
miles to the Collierville Powerhouse at Camp Nine on the Stanislaus River,
which is nine miles up a narrow and windy road beyond Vallecito. This is a 250 Megawatt powerhouse which is
owned by CCWD and operated by Northern California Power Authority. This would be a subject that should be
covered in another article, but it is beyond the scope of this article. The whole North Fork Power system has a
value on near One Billion
dollars, but with the financing and operational costs, CCWD is only getting
approximately about $500,000 income from this, much of which goes to water and
wastewater rates.
From this facility,
GIVAD and drive 12 miles back to Vallecito and up to the Douglas Flat WWTP and
do a quick tour of the plant only. This
is the treatment plant which collects the sewer from the communities of
Vallecito and Douglas Flat. By the way,
this plant was recently the recipient of a $4,000,000 state grant for a new,
state of the art membrane treatment plant that is doing a really great job of
treating the sewage.
From here GIVAD and
drive three miles up to Murphys and out Pennsylvania Gultch Road to a small
community leachfield wastewater treatment system which services the small
Indian Rock subdivision. There is very
little to see above ground, but an operator must make a daily visit to this
system to check the operation, log needed entries and collect samples for
analysis.
Next, GIVAD and
drive seven miles back out to Murphys and up to Forest Meadows WWTP. Do only a quick tour of the plant only, and
then GIVAD and drive five miles up to the Hunter Dam WTP near Hunter Dam
Reservoir. This is the plant that
treats all of the water that serves the Ebbetts Pass areas from Forest Meadows
up to Camp Connell. The main trunk for
this system runs some 15 miles along the Highway 4 corridor and runs from under
3,000 feet to over 6,000 feet in elevation.
The one main exception is for the water system for Blue Lakes Springs
which is its own Mutual water system and gets its water from wells.
GIVAD and drive one
mile over unimproved back road to the Collierville Tunnel Tap which is the
source of water for Hunter Dam WTP, and the primary source of water for Utica
Water and Power Authority, Union Public Water District, City of Angels, and
in-stream flows for Murphys/Angles Creek.
This tunnel tap has a very complicated ownership and permitted arrangement
between CCWD, NCPA, and UWPA which is way too complicated to go into here for
this article.
From this
Collierville Tunnel Tap GIVAD back out to Highway 4 and up four miles to the
Arnold WWTP where they collect and treat the wastewater for a portion of the
Arnold area.
The next stop is up
35 miles up Highway 4 to Spicer Reservoir where the Spicer Reservoir
hydroelectric powerhouse is located at the base of the dam. This is another portion of the North Fork
system that is owned by CCWD and operated and maintained by NCPA. Besides the powerhouse, the dams, lakes,
recreation areas at Spicer, Union, and Utica Reservoirs have a complicated
ownership assignment and numerous water rights holders all who claim to own
some or all the water rights which can lead to many fights over who owns what
water.
From here GIVAD 47
miles back down Highway 4 to Avery and then north on the narrow and winding
Sheep Ranch Road to the small community of Sheep Ranch to the WTP located
there. This is a rather small system
that gets its primary source of water from White Pines Lake in the Arnold area. Again, this plant requires an operator to
come each day to check operations, do water tests, and log data.
After this tour,
GIVAD and drive 14 miles north on Sheep Ranch Road and Railroad Flat Road to
Wilseyville WWTP. This is a small
community WWTP that will, hopefully, be replaced with a holding tank and pump
station to pump the untreated sewage to the nearby WWTP at West Point. But until that occurs, this is an antiquated
plant that needs daily attention. The next
stop is two miles further to West Point WWTP.
This plant was replaced a few years ago with a new state-of-the-art-treatment
plant capable of handling the additional load from Wilseyville WWTP which we
hope to get a grant for in the near future.
The next stop is
only a mile away at the West Point WTP.
This plant was also recently replaced with a new plant funded by the
state due to the disadvantaged community grant program. There are a number of future projects still
to be done in the West Point area, but this new plant has helped
immensely. Since the West Point and Wilseyville
communities are considered to be disadvantaged communities, CCWD is doing all
it can to apply and qualify for disadvantaged funding grants (actually, it is
called a loan forgiveness funding).
Following this
tour, GIVAD and go 40 miles west down Highways 26 and 12 to the Wallace
Community Services District. We were
recently asked by the Wallace community to take over the water and wastewater
operations that service this community.
This is the only ground water system that CCWD has. Fortunately, both of the plants for this
community are in the same area and can be serviced at the same time, with the
requirement that the operations and tests for both systems are different.
The next system is
a small community wastewater leach field operation off of Southworth Road which
is five miles away. Like the Indian
Rock system outside of Murphys, there is not much to see above ground, but it
does require a daily visit to check that it is operating okay and to make the
log entries and to take samples for testing.
After this system,
the next stop is 11 miles at the New Hogan WWTP which is located east of the La
Contenta golf community and north of New Hogan reservoir. This is a fairly complicated complex
requiring a lot of labor and monitoring.
The wastewater is treated to drinking water quality and then this
treated wastewater is stored on site and eventually pumped to the La Contenta
Golf Course to be sprayed on the greens after hours.
Just three miles
further is the hydroelectric New Hogan Powerhouse. While CCWD owns this powerhouse, it is
operated and maintained by the Modesto Irrigation District which pays CCWD for
the power generated. The water in the
reservoir is essentially owned by the Corps of Engineers. CCWD
has the rights for the water for the Jenny Lind WTP which is one mile below the
dam on the Calaveras River. Let it be
noted that when the reservoir is at “minimum pool” all water releases cease
except for CCWD drinking water and for minimum fish flows in the river.
And, finally, the
trip back to headquarters is 14 miles.
We have gone about 265 miles with minimal backtracking and much of the
routes on narrow mountainous and winding roads. If we assume that it would take a minimum of
30 minutes at each tour location which includes opening and closing gates
(often twice at each location), accessing locked buildings, introducing
yourself to the lead operators, and walking around the plant sight, a 30 minute
timeframe would be optimistic. I doubt
that this tour could be completed in two days, but it might if you were to push
yourself hard, but I suspect that it would take three days.
As you can see,
CCWD is a very large and complex system and, yet, we have only 67 employees (48
in operations and 19 in the office for finance, engineering and technical
services). A district this large
requires a lot of trucks, heavy equipment, tools and support and testing
gear. The field employees are always
moving around to cover all of the operations and emergencies. There are 288 miles of water pipe, 125 miles
of collection pipe, numerous water storage tanks, intake pumps, sewage lift
stations and pumps, hundreds of fire hydrants, and myriads of other apparatti
that you will not see on this tour. Besides
operations, the staff is involved in billing and collections, administering the
finances, planning and submitting applications, addressing the many legal
issues, addressing water rights issues, participating in numerous associations
and organizations that are necessary even when it doesn’t appear to be
necessary, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…
To pay for all this
CCWD has only 12,700 water customers, 4620 wastewater customers to pay for all
of this. Additionally, CCWD receives
some county property tax revenue (which has gone down since the recession of
2008 and each year since), hydroelectric revenue, and a number of minor revenue
sources to pay for all this. The
majority of the property tax and hydroelectric revenues go to support the
O&M costs of CCWD. CCWD has done a
good job of controlling the budget and maintaining reserves needed for most of
its needs. The main exception to this
is the reserves needed for Capital Improvement Projects, especially replacement
CIP reserves. Since the financial
crisis of 2008, all CCWD replacement CIP reserves had been exhausted and much
had been deferred until it became unmanageable, thus the need for the massive
monthly price hikes of last year, all of which will be put toward replacement
CIP projects.
Thank you for
taking this tour with me, and please forgive me for throwing in some comments
at the end. I don’t think most people
realize how vast CCWD is. It is my hope
that this will help people understand.
Dennis Dooley, CCWD
Director, District 4
