Sonoma County hospitals work to rein in water use

If Sutter Health’s hospital in Santa Rosa were still on Chanate Road, it would be using a little more than half a million gallons of water a month more than it is now.

A slew of state-of-the-art water efficiency and conservation systems in the new Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital on Mark West Springs Road have resulted in a staggering 40 percent reduction in water use. These include upgrading nearby residential plumbing fixtures, low-flow hospital water systems and a drought-friendly outdoor irrigation system.

That’s just what the doctor ordered, or in this case Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration, which this week issued emergency regulations limiting potable water use for outdoor irrigation at California hospitals and skilled nursing facilities.

The new rules echo Brown’s 2-month-old emergency drought mandate that calls for a 25 percent reduction in urban water use statewide. The new hospital rules were released this week, but local hospital officials say they’ve been working on conservation measures for months.

“We really have been headed down this track for some time with the design of our new hospital,” said Mike Purvis, Sutter Santa Rosa Regional Hospital’s chief administrative officer. “We have made huge reductions in water consumption.”

Sutter’s hospital construction project included spending $750,000 to upgrade residential plumbing fixtures for 296 Larkfield homes near the hospital site. These homes were equipped with low-flow alternatives to reduce water usage.

The hospital, which uses about 760,000 gallons of water a month, is also equipped with low-flow indoor water fixtures that reduced the hospital’s use of water by 34 percent. Drought resistance plants and landscaping outside the hospital are expected to reduce outdoor water use by 50 percent, Sutter officials said.

When it does rain, a system of bio-swales channel parking lot runoff water into landscaped areas for collection. That water, which would otherwise have gone into storm drains, is sent to basins through an underground drainage system and ultimately used to replenish the hospital’s own well.

Purvis said the hospital’s water use practices satisfy the governor’s recent mandate.

Hospitals, which essentially house people day and night, are among the biggest users of water, according to a 2012 report by the EPA’s Energy Star program.

The report, which is based on Energy Star’s Portfolio Manager tracking system, found that the median water use at U.S. hospitals is about 315 gallons a day per hospital bed. A rough calculation of Sutter’s 760,000 gallons a month puts the hospital, with about 94 overnight beds, at about 270 gallons a day.?By comparison, the median water use for hotels is about 102 gallons a day per room, while the median use at an office building is 13 daily gallons for each worker.

Gary Toavs, chief engineer of facilities at Petaluma Valley Hospital, said hospitals are bound by strict sanitation and infection controls that require the use of water.

“We’re limited on what we can do in-house,” Toavs said. “Our biggest gain for conservation is through our landscaping.”

When Gov. Brown issued his drought mandate in April, Toavs and Petaluma Valley Hospital officials began looking at ways of reducing outdoor water use at the hospital, which boasts large expansive lawns.

Water use for the lawns off North McDowell Boulevard and Professional Drive has been reduced by 50 percent. New signs have been posted on the browning lawns, declaring that, “Brown is the New Green,” said Jane Read, the Petaluma hospital’s vice president of operations.

“We paid attention to what the governor was asking,” Read said.

Other water conservation measures, she said, include putting new mulch around the campus for moisture retention, replacing numerous water-hogging plants with only mulch. The intent behind the browning of the hospital’s large lawns is to let them go dormant but not die.

“We’re not going to stop watering altogether because that’s going to kill the grass and that’s not environmentally sound either,” Read said.

Toavs said the hospital has contacted the city about the possible use of reclaimed water. He said the city has future plans to use recycled water at nearby Lucchesi Park.

At Aurora Santa Rosa Hospital, a psychiatric hospital, plans are just now underway to cut lawn-watering schedules back to two days a week, as mandated by the State Water Resources Control Board’s emergency conservation regulation.

The regulations call on commercial, industrial and institutional properties to either reduce outdoor irrigation of landscapes to no more than two days a week or reduce water use supplied by sources other than a water supplier by 25 percent.

The campus at Aurora has a large expanse of lawn that sets the hospital back from Fulton Road about 400 feet.

“We gotta back off our watering to two days a week,” said Ken Miebert, Aurora’s CEO. “We are just now starting to implement that ... that’s what we’re going to have to do.”

David Leighton, support services administrator for Kaiser Permanente Santa Rosa Medical Center, said Kaiser is also responding to the state’s severe drought.

Leighton said that Kaiser nationally has instituted a policy to reduce water use.

“We have been working to comply with all local and state conservation plans, which complements many of the efforts we have already implemented,” Leighton said in an email.

That includes reducing lawn areas in favor of native and drought-resistant landscaping at medical centers, installing low-flow plumbing fixtures, automatic faucets, and dual flush toilets.

You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 707-521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @renofish.