When the drought hit hard in 2014, Dublin San Ramon Services District (DSRSD), a water and wastewater utility, learned that it would receive only 5 percent of its typical water allocation for the 2014 water year. This meant that outdoor irrigation had to be severely curtailed in DSRSD’s service area and customers would likely need to let their lawns die.

DSRSD operations manager Dan Gallagher came home and said to his wife “we might not be able to water the yard.” Rosalie Gallagher turned to her husband and said, “Honey, you have to do something, you have all this recycled water, we should use it to water the lawn.” That conversation led to an idea for a new recycled water program in California that has saved more than 100 million gallons (375 million liters) of drinking water so far.

The district worked the regional Water Quality Control Board on a new standard for the residential use of recycled water and customer training and application agreements were established.

The first residential recycled water fill station opened on Thursday, June 12, 2014. News of the program hit international newspapers, and local television news crews flooded to the fill station to see how this new resource could be utilized. As interest grew from the news community, so did demand from residents with dying landscapes.

The City of Livermore, located on the edge of the Livermore Valley wine country and hot on the tails of DSRSD’s great success story, opened their own fill station three weeks later.

By October, Central Contra Costa Sanitary District in Martinez was making plans to open their own fill station. Demand picked up from there but got a big boost in April 2015 when Gov. Jerry Brown announced a statewide mandatory conservation requirement of 25 percent for urban water suppliers.

With that, residential recycled water fill stations would become a lifeline for landscapes in need.

Within the next few months, customers were signing up by the hundreds. Demand skyrocketed for information about what tanks to buy, which pumps to use and how to unload them once home. To fill the void, I created RecycledH2O.net as a resource for recycled water haulers everywhere.

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