Stewards of the Environment

Rinse a plate, drain a bathtub, flush a toilet – you may be done with your cleanup job after you wash something down the drain, but the wastewater doesn’t just disappear. It is treated at the Ojai Valley Sanitary District’s sophisticated wastewater treatment plant. Here the wastewater is cleaned and safely returned to the environment.

Protecting the Ventura River and Estuary

The Ojai Valley Sanitary District collects and processes wastewater from about 20,000 residents of the City of Ojai, the unincorporated Ojai Valley, and the north Ventura Avenue area. Approximately 120 miles of trunk and main sewer lines form a network that transports the untreated wastewater downstream to the Ojai Valley Treatment Plant.

Because of its location along the environmentally sensitive Ventura River habitat, the District has gone to great lengths to ensure that the treatment process has a minimal impact on the environment. In the early 1990’s, new state requirements and concern that wastewater effluent may have been causing increased vegetation in the river downstream of the treatment plant, triggered an extensive (environmentally friendly) redesign of the plant. In 1997 the new award winning plant went online.

Every detail from the method of processing to new above-ground fuel storage was considered with environmental impact in mind. The result is a highly efficient, state-of-the-art plant that returns water to the river that is safe for the environment, and produces rich, reusable biosolids.