Coronado residents are frustrated with new construction that they say is wasting hundreds of thousands of gallons of water a day.
“We’re paying to have perfectly good drinking water to be treated as sewage,” said Coronado resident Jerry Toci. “It’s very frustrating.”
Toci and several other residents said there is a natural fresh water well that pumps millions of gallons a day into an aquifer beneath Coronado. Toci even dug a shallow well that he drinks water from directly.
Toci said he is frustrated because nearby home construction sites are pumping the same water out of the ground and depositing it into Coronado’s sewer system instead of putting it to good use.
“Which to me is really dumb and it’s an incredible waste of good water,” he said. “We pay the City of San Diego to process our sewer. So, pumping groundwater into the sewer system comes with a tremendous cost.”
He said he’s doubly frustrated because the City of Coronado says the aquifer doesn’t exist.
Toci said a home construction site two blocks away is dumping 300,000 gallons of water a day into the sewer system. He’d like to see that water preserved and used for agricultural purposes.
“It’s not sewage water and it shouldn’t be pumped into the sewage system,” he said.
A Coronado spokesperson told 10News they have no evidence of a fresh water aquifer underneath the city. They contend all the water is brackish and would require expensive desalination to make it useful to the city.
A local historian pointed out there is proof of the fresh water spring and said the Hotel del Coronado even relied on that water for years.
