Managing Water Supplies Through Innovation in Southern California

The City of Lakewood, California, hired Tetra Tech to design a new stormwater capture project that will improve water quality in the Los Cerritos Channel by removing pollutants conveyed within stormwater. The project consists of an air-inflated rubber dam diversion system to re-direct all runoff from the channel through a pre-treatment system to remove trash, debris, and sediment.

Following treatment, the water will be conveyed into a storage and infiltration facility and ultimately used for irrigation at the city’s Bolivar Park. This system will satisfy the park’s annual 9.5-million-gallon irrigation requirements for landscaped areas, which are currently met with potable water.

To improve the capacity of the stormwater capture system, Tetra Tech applied smart water technology by using real-time controls. These smart components include sensors in the underground storage facility that measure the water level in the storage tank as well as within the infiltration chamber. The facility connects to National Weather Service data through a cloud-based system to assess the likelihood of upcoming precipitation. If rain is expected, then the system will evaluate whether the stormwater capture system has the capacity to perform during the upcoming storm to avoid flooding. If the system does not have storage capacity, it will evaluate other options such as reducing the diversion rate, increasing irrigation use, evaluating the infiltration rates for groundwater recharge, or discharging filtered stormwater back into the channel. 

Learn more about the Bolivar Park Stormwater Capture Project.