Environment

Construction Progresses At North County Desalination Plant

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published December 27, 2013 at 11:29 AM PST

This story was published more than 10 years ago.

Crews working on the tanks and the 10-mile-long pipeline that will carry the desalinated sea water to San Marcos where it will join the San Diego County Water Authority’s network reportedly are on schedule.

Construction Progresses At North County Desalination Plant

The billion-dollar plant being built on the Carlsbad coastline is wrapping up its first year of construction.

CARLSBAD — There’s not much to see but cranes when you drive past the construction site of the largest desalination project yet built in the Western Hemisphere. But the billion-dollar plant being built on the Carlsbad coastline is wrapping up its first year of construction. The project is ontrack to start producing 7 percent of the region’s water in another two years.

Peter Maclaggan of Poseidon Resources said crews are on schedule, working on the tanks and the 10-mile-long pipeline that will carry the desalinated sea water to San Marcos where it will join the San Diego County Water Authority’s network.

"We’ve gone all the way through San Marcos and we’re now also laying pipe from west to east in Carlsbad, and expect that the two construction crews will meet around El Camino Real somewhere around the end of 2014," Maclaggan said, adding that will complete the pipeline construction.

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Maclaggan said trenches for the 54-inch diameter pipe are as much as 30-feet deep. The plant itself is designed to look like an ordinary office building.

About 350 people are working to meet the project’s deadline, he said. The contract calls for Poseidon to start providing up to 50 million gallons of desalinated water a day by early 2016.

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.