Remediating, treating, and restoring a contaminated groundwater source

San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin Restoration

Los Angeles only gets about 11% of its water supply from local groundwater (nearly 20% in some drought years). Most of the City’s water comes from the Los Angeles Aqueduct—which is Eastern Sierra snowmelt—and from the California Aqueduct, which is water from the Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta. However, the San Fernando Valley Groundwater Basin (SFB) is 226 square miles (585 square kilometres) of potentially accessible, nearby groundwater. The problem? The SFB is one of the largest contaminated groundwater areas in the US.

Alongside Kiewit, we’re providing process, civil, mechanical, structural, architectural, landscape architectural, and instrumentation and control engineering design services on Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) projects that will advance the remediation and use of the SFB. The Kiewit-Stantec design-build team recently completed its basis of design report, which outlines technology that will be used to treat contaminated groundwater, as well as provide the basis for facility layout at LADWP’s North Hollywood Central and Tujunga remediation sites. The $480-million projects will remove existing industrial contaminants that date back to the 1940s and provide a critical, local source of clean drinking water for the Los Angeles region.

The projects advance two key goals of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s Green New Deal—significantly reducing the purchase of imported water by 2025 and producing 71% of LA’s water supply locally by 2035. Once fully restored, the SFB will be an aquifer that can provide drinking water to more than 800,000 Angelenos.