During periods of prolonged drought many Glenn County residents who depend on well water have come up dry.
In response, the city of Orland partnered with the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) in 2021 to extend its municipal water service to well users within the city, and into the county.
Pete Carr, Orland’s city manager, said the project is currently moving from the planning stage to putting pipes in the ground for those with dry wells inside the city limits.
“That’s about 30 out of the 180 people that we’re connecting,” Carr said. “Phase two, that’s probably 120 of the homes. They’re all in the county, south and southeast of Orland.”
Orland draws its water from a massive underlying aquifer and has a reliable supply even in times of drought, Carr said. But storage capacity is limited. He said this project will solve that.
“Stage four is a new storage tank,” Carr said. “[For] a hundred years we’ve been reliant on an 80,000 gallon tank. We’re going to replace that with a 1-million gallon tank, and that storage will not only provide a lot of resilience for the city residents and businesses, but it will greatly increase our firefighting capacity.”
In addition, the project will also add a deep well to augment seven existing wells.
Currently, city crews are laying lines to connect homes within Orland’s city limits to municipal water, Carr said, and a contract was just concluded with a Chico company to complete the work.
He said the entire project should be finished before summer 2024.
