http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-reclaim2jan02,0,7789563.story

O.C. sewage will soon be drinking water
A $490-million plant will clean effluent to state standards, then inject it into the groundwater basin for further filtration.
By Dan Weikel, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 2, 2008

As a hedge against water shortages and population growth, Orange County has begun operating the world’s largest, most modern reclamation plant — a facility that can turn 70 million gallons of treated sewage into drinking water every day.

The new purification system at the Orange County Water District headquarters in Fountain Valley cost about $490 million and comprises a labyrinth of pipes, filters, holding tanks and pumps across 20 acres.

Officials say the final product is as clean as distilled water and so pure that lime has to be added to it to keep it from leaching minerals out of concrete pipes, thus weakening them.

It COULD lose hundreds of thousands of gallons, IF…

1) nobody did any sort of outside patching like mickey suggests.

2) they keep refilling the water tower and never bother to let it drain down below the level of the holes so they can fix it.

3) You wait a damn long time.

Figure at best, a gallon a minute, is 1440 gallons a day. So “hundreds of thousands” of gallons, plural, will require 138 days, give or take.

Now, officials do say they have to wait for most of the water to drain, but if they stop feeding water TO the holding tank, it won’t take very long for Catawba County to drain down 750,000 gallons. Surely not 138 days.