Listen to the commentary
Real Audio : MP3 download
If you invited friends or family to join you for an
open house at a wastewater treatment plant, would they laugh? I’m not naming
any names, but I was on my own when I set out for the recent open house at the Urbana-Champaign
Sanitary District’s facility on East University Avenue.
To my delight, however,
plenty of other local residents were curious enough about the plant come out
for a look around. According to the estimate of UCSD executive director Rick
Manner, approximately 200 people stopped by over the course of the day—enough
to make him consider holding the event annually.
Manner and his staff were motivated to host an
open house because they wanted the people who are served by the plant to see
what was accomplished in its just-completed, two-year renovation. Updates to
the plant included new buildings to accommodate some of the treatment processes
that take place there, as well as new space to accommodate employees as well.
[Photos by author: primary clarifier; control room; water sample; at the outfall.]
Of course, since most visitors to the plant came knowing
little of the processes used to treat wastewater, the highlight of the open
house was a guided tour that allowed us to see them firsthand.
I was fortunate to fall in with a group that
included a Champaign father who had brought along his two young daughters and a
friend of theirs. At the outset of our tour, the girls were quick to say they had
come only because they hadn’t been given a choice. But their tune soon changed,
and their lively interest made the afternoon more enjoyable for everyone
involved.
Our tour was led by Dave Hermes, whose regular
role is supervisor of maintenance at the plant. He provided concise
explanations of what we were seeing at each stop, and answered our questions
with the patience of a theme-park tour guide.
We started at the building where sewage entering
the plant undergoes an initial screening to remove paper and grit. The material
taken out in this process is the only byproduct of the plant that goes to a
landfill, and the quantity of it is surprisingly small, on the order of a
Dumpster or two a week.
We then proceeded through the plant in the same
order that wastewater does: to the enormous, circular open-air tanks set deep
in the ground where primary clarification takes place; to the concrete weirs
where the wastewater churns with bacteria and other microorganisms in a process
called “activated sludge”; to secondary clarifiers; to the tallest structures
at the plant, nitrification towers, where the water runs down through stacked
layers of honeycomb-like plastic, and toxic ammonia is converted to nontoxic
nitrates by the action of another group of microorganisms; and finally to the
building where water runs through a fabric filter; and back outdoors, where a
chlorine-based disinfectant renders the effluent of the plant fit for human
contact and capable of supporting aquatic life.
At each stop, a tightly sealed jar of the water
from that stage was available for close inspection.
Our tour ended where the discharge from the plant
pours into the Saline Branch, one of the most significant tributaries to the
Salt Fork of the Vermilion River. As our group dispersed, I overheard the
father of the young girls ask for reactions to the tour. “It was more
interesting than I thought it would be,” allowed one. “Definitely not boring,”
added the other.
One measure of how well the UCSD’s northeast
treatment plant does its job is the diversity of aquatic life that thrives
downstream from it. Executive director Manner called my attention to the
discovery this year of a fish called the big-eyed chub in the Saline Branch.
It’s a species that hasn’t been found in Champaign County since 1899.
Tune in next week for a story about the fish
survey that prompted that phone call.
