San Diego selects MWH Global and Brown and Caldwell team to manage water supply programme

Water infrastructure firm MWH Global has won a $30m contract from the City of San Diego in California, US to manage and assist in the delivery of Pure Water San Diego, in co-ordination with Brown and Caldwell.

Local process engineering and water quality firm Trussell Technologies is also a part of the contract, which has been awarded for an initial term of five years.

Under the terms of the contract, the firms are expected to offer management services for the Pure Water San Diego programme, which is a 20-year programme to provide reliable and cost-effective drinking water supply to San Diego.

The $2.7bn environment-friendly programme in San Diego has been designed to ensure safe, reliable, and cost-effective potable water supply to the Californian city.

It entails the use of advanced technology for purification of recycled water, aiming to eliminate the city’s water dependency and boost its resiliency against drought, climate change or other natural disasters.

City of San Diego Public Utilities Department director Halla Razak said: "Pure Water San Diego is needed to secure a long-term, reliable water supply for the city."

According to the contract, the MWH/Brown and Caldwell team will initiate strategic planning, project delivery, programme controls, predesign of conveyance and treatment facilities, design oversight/management, pilot testing of proposed technologies, regulatory permitting, outreach and public education, quality management, and risk mitigation services for the programme.

Construction of a water purification facility is an initial part of the programme, which is expected to be operational by 2023 and can produce 15 million gallons of drinking water daily.

Once fully implemented, Pure Water San Diego has a target to produce 83 million gallons of purified water per day by 2035, to supply one third of the city’s potable water supply.

The programme also intends to lessen San Diego’s volume of treated wastewater discharged to the ocean.

Brown and Caldwell director of client services Jay Patil said: "In any place where there is water scarcity, especially in the Southwest, our clients are thinking of water in new ways — aiming to manage all water as one integrated resource.

"With San Diego now leading the way in large-scale, state-of-the-art potable reuse implementation, many other communities will begin to look at their water supplies differently."