East Bay Municipal Utility District

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The East Bay Municipal Utility District (EBMUD), colloquially referred to as "EBMUD", "East Bay Mud" or sometimes just pronounced as "ebmud" (i.e. ebb-mud), provides water and sewage treatment for customers in portions of Alameda County and Contra Costa County in California, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay (including the cities of Oakland, Berkeley and several nearby suburbs).

The district was founded after a severe drought in 1923 proved that a local system of reservoirs was inadequate. The district built a pipeline to the Mokelumne River in the Sierra Nevada. Several hundred miles of large diameter pipes bring the water to reservoirs in the East Bay area. Water is then transported to treatment plants and delivered to local reservoirs and tanks, thence distributed by gravity to households.

In the 1980s with federal grant funding EBMUD undertook a major facility expansion to accommodate wet weather overflow (i.e. the vastly increased system demand in the rainy season). This project took many years of construction for implementation, after the planning and Environmental Impact Statement phases.

In 2008-May, EBMUD announced a severe drought and austerity measures for its customers. Its conservation requirement imposes a mandatory 15 percent reduction in water use (based on previous usage) and issues punitive measures to both 'already efficient' and 'non-efficient' customers alike, that fail to reduce usage by the target volume.^[1]