City of White Salmon Aquifer Storage and Recovery — Completing the Water Supply Puzzle

Municipal water systems face continual challenges providing safe, reliable water supplies for their communities. These challenges can include physical constraints, such as declining aquifer yield, and compliance with regulatory requirements, such as water right permitting and water treatment standards. This talk discusses the City of White Salmon’s (City) aquifer storage and recovery (ASR) project and its ability to deliver both physical and regulatory water system solutions.

The City was historically served by a high quality surface water source from Buck Creek, a tributary of the White Salmon River. When compliance with increased surface treatment standards proved costly, the City, in partnership with the City of Bingen and Port of Klickitat, developed a new groundwater well field to replace surface supplies. The well field was initially highly productive, but has shown significant decrease in yield over time. Additionally, the City faced shortages in the annual water supply authorized under their water rights, forcing a moratorium on new connections.

In response to these shortages in both source yield and regulatory authority, the City seeks to improve supply reliability by pursuing an ASR project to take seasonally available winter flows from the new treatment plant, inject treated water into a City production well, and recover water during peak summer demands. The ASR project just finished the pilot testing stage, which showed the City can expect to inject, store, and recover about 100 acre-feet per year, and thus provide approximately 25% of peak (summer) demand.