Article Title: Long-term project will reduce tainted water in Ariz., Calif.

Excerpt: By 2013, work crews will have ripped apart every residential street in this city of 55,000 people, dug trenches through the front yard of nearly every home, buried more than 400 miles of pipe and decommissioned almost every septic tank within a 25-mile radius.

Excerpt: Worried about declining water quality, bad publicity from polluted beaches and the threat of a state-imposed building ban, Lake Havasu City decided in 2001 to build a central sewer system. Voters approved the $463 million price tag and work is nearly finished on the fourth year of an 11-year project that will let Lake Havasu give up the dubious title of largest U.S. city without sewer service.

Excerpt: Lake Havasu City's rapid growth during the 1990s underscored the need for sewer service. But for many, the real wake-up call arrived on a miserably hot June afternoon in 1994. Temperatures had been climbing steadily for days and on June 29 seared the city with a 128-degree high, a mark that still stands as the hottest day on record in Arizona.

That same day, the city manager closed all the city beaches along the lake's eastern shore after routine water samples found fecal-coliform levels 17 times higher than the allowable amount. The beaches remained closed for days, then weeks, as officials tried to pin down the cause of the contamination. An early suspect was seepage from the thousands of septic tanks uphill from the lakeshore.