Recently completed at a cost of about $148 million, the Water Storage Project is located one mile southwest of Escondido, just west of Lake Hodges. Expected to provide a surface spanning 200 acres, the lake may be as deep as 300 feet and hold enough water to serve 50,000 households for one year.

Project components include the following:

• An open, raw-water-storage reservoir with a capacity of 24,000 acre-feet of water
• A concrete dam
• An 82-million-gallon-per-day water treatment plant
• A 54-inch-diameter pipeline that would stretch 1 1/2 miles between Olivenhain reservoir and Lake Hodges, allowing the two facilities to be operated as one unit for emergency storage purposes, together adding about 38,000 acre-feet of emergency storage capacity.
• A flow control station, which presumably would keep water and large aquatic animal life from moving to the Olivenhain reservoir. Since 1918, all major San Diego aquaducts and pipelines have bypassed Lake Hodges, and only a small, open-air flume with a filter/blocking pump station was allowed to connect to Rancho Santa Fe's San Dieguito Reservoir. (Note: in 2005, a closed pipeline replaced the open-air flume system going to Rancho Santa Fe.)
• A treated waterline
• A pump station
• Above-ground electrical power poles and substation
• An access road (Via Ambiente) and bridge
• The 750-acre Elfin Forest Recreational Reserve (Park)
• The dam is to be a roller-compacted dam, rising as high as 308 feet, making it the highest dam of its kind in the United States. The Project's water treatment plant will use membrane ultrafiltration techniques which will allow the Olivenhain Water District to enhance water quality and economically compete with private-sector water treatment and water softening industries.

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