TUCSON, Ariz. (KGUN) — Water is a valuable resource in the desert so the City of Tucson keeps a lot of its water in a bank.
It’s not a bank in the usual sense.
The Southeast Houghton Area Recharge Project takes treated wastewater and pumps it into three large basins. The basins are built to have a bottom of porous earth. That allows the water to filter down about 350 feet to an aquifer—an underground area able to hold large amounts of water.
There, the water waits, protected from evaporation, until the city needs to tap it, and use it.
The process of filtering down to the aquifer adds an additional cleaning to the purification of the water received before it went into the basins.
The city says each basin can infiltrate about seven feet of water per day. That works out to 1.3 billion gallons of recycled water per year.
----
STAY IN TOUCH WITH US ANYTIME, ANYWHERE
- Download our free app for Roku, FireTV, AppleTV, Alexa, and mobile devices.
- Sign up for daily newsletters emailed to you
- Like us on Facebook
- Follow us on Instagram
- Follow us on Twitter
- Follow us on Youtube
