Transcript [EN]: Wastewater Training, 1 of 3

all right hello and good morning everyone uh hope you heard me on the audio checks we gave it a few minutes to make sure our audience was here so if you hear some background noise it might be some people shuffling in a couple minutes late uh but thanks for calling in on time and thanks for joining us this morning uh my name is Drew Youngs and I'll be moderating today uh first of three Wastewater training uh all new piic internal staff webinar series uh kind of a long title but be a lot of good information today um our speaker is Jim Li Li Liberty and I'll tell you a bit more about Jim before we get started uh but before we get into the meat of the training I just wanted to give you uh for those of you that are calling in um some tips on using the system if it's your first time can be a little confusing um your line is muted so we can't hear you uh but the idea is that you can hear us as we move through the slides and chat about them uh to communicate with me or to pose a question for the group or to Jim you can use the the chat function um as Jim is presenting today I'll be keeping an eye on the questions that come in Via chat and when we have you know a good opportunity for discussion when I have some questions coming in you know I'll ask Jim when it's a good time and uh you know we'll we'll chat about your your questions so use that chat function uh to communicate with me um you can go in and out of full screen by using the arrow function you just uh you want to hover at the top of your screen where that uh green bar should be and it'll give you kind of a drop down menu to uh navigate the system uh we are going to record the webinar so uh this will be up probably on our website in the future um we'll have it in electronic form so you'll be able to access it uh you can contact me contact Jim contact Tom Groves and you'll be able to get that uh information so a little bit uh about Jim uh Jim works with us to develop and coordinate uh newp pic's Wastewater and safety training programs he's the co-chair of the Massachusetts training advisory committee and oversees Massachusetts Wastewater Management training program uh before coming to nepic he spent uh over three decades as a chemical process engineer and a variety of different Industries um so for the training overview that gem or excuse me this is an overview of Gem's training um it's broken into three separate units each unit is going to be a standalone webinar of about three hours and these are on three the three different dates that you're probably aware of um and again they'll be available later as well for you to come back and review so unit one is day one that's today uh Jim's going to tell us about uh some reasons why we treat Wastewater the history of uh regulations Wastewater sources and characteristics collection systems preliminary treatment and a little bit about disinfection um and then unit two is intro to Wastewater microbiology biological treatment and unit three which is day three in February uh we'll cover nutrient removal bio solids and an overview of industrial pre-treatment so without further Ado I'm going to go ahead and hand it off to Jim thanks Drew uh to expand a little bit on uh what Drew was telling you about myself and outside of outing me through over three decades of work actually a chemical process engineer by degree and got my career started regarding sugar which is a long way from dealing with Wastewater but nonetheless I fell into the Wastewater field pretty much by accident the way most people do uh working for a small Chemical Company in nation New Hampshire and they actually had a wastewater treatment system because they were direct dischargers of their influence to the verac river y know what that direct discharger is what viewing the waste water into the river right we were going directly into the marac river and at the time I took over the process they've been operating for about five years uh they had a nift permit and I imagine you all know what nippy stands for and uh at that time had actually no certified operators they were just chugging along nicely and getting away with it uh Hamshire the regulations were a little weird uh since we weren't really dealing with domestic waste uh it kind of fell under the radar we still had a state permit we had the Nifty permit uh and we were in an activated Sledge process much like most Municipal systems and I felt that since I was going to have to learn all this stuff very fast I might as well get certified and I went through the certification process up in New Hampshire uh eventually getting a grade FL which is their highest current hold a five combin down here in Massachusetts uh Massachusetts a bit different from most other states in that they have industrial certification and at the combined level five and six here in Massachusetts that means I could work in an industrial facility I could work in a municipal operation that being said I uh got thrown into it very quickly I found it to be a very fascinating field and uh I kind of miss having a plant to play with but nonetheless this is a lot cleaner so what we're doing through this uh program is basically a boil down version of what I normally do over a 6 week period six one day a week to six weeks uh for people that are getting into the business and want to become certified I also do a higher level one an intermediate course of people advancing up through the grade levels so I'm jumping over a lot of stuff that you really don't need to know but you're going to get a good overview of what goes on Soup To Nuts in a municipal treatment plant uh the various types and you something to go on like when you're doing your work relate back to how this may or may not affect what we're doing on our end of the pipe so again that's me this my uh my email address my direct line of my desk if you ever have any questions about uh wastewater treatment or anything like that we got a lot of people here primarily out of New York state so you guys run a little bit differently in certification process from what we do here uh again I'm this this is my deal I get up and we go through the room and find out who's around that's a little bit difficult in this current circumstance but uh you know about me and how I get started and why I'm the guy in the front of the room stuff so we're going to talk about wastewater treatment again this morning uh going to go over a brief overview of the whole process how it get started and all that uh this particular plant that you're looking at now is Deer Island in b in Mass deer Islands one of the largest facilities in the country uh typical days about 350 to 400 million gallons highest number I've seen go through the plant was uh we had some very heavy spring rains about it's almost 10 years now and the highest number I saw over there was 1.3 billion difference being a billion gallons of rain water going through the plant really so why why are we in this business why do we have to even deal with this stuff civilization went on for centuries without any Wastewater plants without any septic systems or assess pools or any that kind of stuff why do we have to do this population growth what population growth population well that certainly exacerbated the situation but everybody wants clean water you want to be able to go out and go canoeing or swimming in the lakes and the streams it's also a part of drinking water protection part of it too untreated this water just thrown into the rivers and the waterways uh we're going to have oxygen depletion so basically the river is going to die off Aquatic Life can't survive we're going to have odors and scum and it's just going to look nasty and be ugly and you're certainly not going to be able to drink it uh the issue that we're dealing with to a large degree now as we move forward with Technologies is the the problem of urif foration utation when you throw a lot of nutrients into the river water and you help grow aquatic plants algae and weeds and all that and they slowly take over and really the biggest part of our uh business really want to look at it from that standpoint is we're in the health business disease transmission waterborne diseases again this is what we're try to avoid fish kills toxicity can generate that that green pond that's nutrification that's the problem that we deal with and just nasty looking streams again these are the problems we're trying to deal with eliminating waterborne diseases the largest reason for population growth to the degree that it is now is because of wastewater treatment and the improvements that have happened over the past 100 years or so but again we go back a long ways there were efforts made to deal with waste human waste largely uh we got to go back to uh days of Roman Emperor you early days ad public restrooms and all that tough on a cold morning but what are you going to do but really Rome Talk 50 60 AD Rome brought in over 2 million gallons of water each day from the mountains the the aqueduct out all the night fountains was very pretty but its real purpose was to flush the waste out get it in the river and make it go away that was wastewater treatment for centuries get it out of town let it be somebody else's issue even then they had concerns over control of water you had old fronter this year he was the guy in charge of water back in 80 ad nobody can do anything without checking with him necessary that a power the supply flowing from the delivery tanks be utilized not only for cleaning the city but flushing the SS that was treatment back then moving away as time went on we did have that population growth yeah had start to have some really dense inhabited cities and stuff and again they would put ditches in the middle of the street they were actually starting to with the concept of sewers to take stuff away but again it was still just to get it to the nearest river and have it Flow Away I've got Shakespeare up here because uh time of Shakespeare right around 1600 the the island of great Brit really only grew in population because of immigration from Continental Europe left to itself the island would grow its population big collar outbreak boom it would drop hyoid boom same thing it just going back and forth and had no real growth early days of United States all you needed with some land you dig a pit over in the corner put up a nice little shed you're good to go uh and even in the populated cities there were back alleys they had all the privies just lined on up uh and actually uh if you remember sh we had a somebody came in and showed their license for night soil yes Blaser night soil was it was the industry that there were people would come in clean these things out and they would do it during the night and then they fertilizer later on that's where night soil actually came from the version of septic hollers I guess you want to look at again as time went on populations grew big cities started sewering back to 1600s we have some sewers even in the Boston area they still dig up wooden pipes that were found for using transporting water into transporting waste into the harbor again just to get it out of town no real treatment just move it out of the way early part of the 19th century it started to have some issues had a big outbreak in London that really decided to open up some ice science was advancing at that time microbiology and other stuff was developing we a lot of sewers were being put in but we had this Big C outbreak in London 1854 and a fellow by the name of Dr snow is the guy that actually made the connection and they found this well pump that was in the c town he studied all of the Cera incidents around this particular area and found that this one well this little blue circle here in the center of all this mess seemed to be the problem and when they investigated they found that the well was actually Less Than 3 MERS away from a Cess poool and it was leaking in and anybody that lived in the area was using that for water people have walked by is why you had some of these outliers were all getting contaminated from that they realized that they had to really separate these two items and not let them get together again with sewering and some other material look at sewered cities as opposed to unsu cities in terms of color of death they change now it's not so priv we have all these cess pools all around to any drinking water and if you look at individual cities as they sewered over time typus deaths all dropped off considerably so they start to realize that you had to keep them separate but they still weren't really treating it wasn't until the latter part of the 19th century in Britain they came up with this process that they called Dr basically they pum all the water into a tank and let it sit solids would settle to the bottom of the tank the supern look relatively clean they take that and throw that in the water the sledge that would be removed on a regular basis would then take it off and use as fertilizer that was all well and good and they were doing a pretty decent job except for the fact that this uh liquid that they were Sing Off to the river still contained about 60% of the bod of the water wasn't because it was soluble it didn't settle out solid around 1890 they developed what's called a trickling filter and this is actually a real method of wastewater treatment what we've got here is a nice little thing all built of stone and stuff you've got a tank you fill it with some sort of a media well it's rock or Broken Bricks or something like that you pump the water in let the water trickle down through that Medium organisms live on on that media and where does it sound one man's waight is another man's treasure well that's food to them all this waste water they would break down the bods that trickled through this unit so you had a very low bod coming out of this thing when we talk about trickling filters we'll talk much more detail about this next week it's not a filter in the traditional sense think of it as a bod filter in fact you're going to have more solids coming out of this and actually go in and this idea was brought across to the US little after the turn of the 1900s now the activated Sledge system which is the most common method used today was a lot of that development work was done here in Massachusetts over at Lawrence experimental station and this is where you really have uh the optimum amount of control over what's going to happen in your process you can do all sorts of things with these organisms by manipulating their conditions it's a very common method but even at the that there was not a lot of Regulation forcing anybody to do the sort of things uh Rivers were still just dumping grounds for Waste whether it's domestic waste Industrial Waste this is you can't quite see it but this is the meramac river thank you this is actually up in Franklin New Hampshire where the winaki and the pum jaas it come together to form the merac river and uh it's it's it's an old SL as you can tell it's pretty well yellowed out but still there's no fly fishermen there's nobody tubing there's nobody swimming that water is barely looking like water nasty nasty stuff and that isn't even 50 years ago the nashille river yeah I'm from Nashville I remember the river looking like this was making red paper that day supped St here I actually had a job uh in a mill much like this one you see on the right alongside the river was right in downtown now as excuse me and uh the Plastics thing we had a fellow who put together all of these Dy powdered dye to mix with the plastic for whatever it is we were producing that day and at the end of his shift he just wash his floor and all that stuff just went right out into the river and right through downtown nashille and no big deal that's just the way things work but as time went on a little bit more time uh was an incident out in Ohio this is the kova river and we got our flammable sign bit of a joke but not really 1969 Cleveland Ohio there picture on the left there's a large anybody been to Cleveland well say so you're familiar with the flats no I to Parma the Rock and Roll Hall big Industrial Area when you cross the bridge over the the Koga River you look out and you see this it was the stereotypical picture of pollution of every St you could think of and one day the river caught fire fire lasted about 15 minutes wasn't a big deal it wasn't the first time the river had caught fire was the first River to catch fire but it just happened to happen at a time when the environmental movement was really starting to get some wheels and they finally came across this picture that was the turning point for our Rivers will burn what else do we have to wait for you know before we finally get something as a result of that we ended up with our what we call the s Water Act an amendment to the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1972 public 92500 which brought in billions of dollars for training Engineers training operators building plants upgrading plants completely turning over the whole aspect of Wastewater control and their challenge was to make them fishable and swimmable by 1983 and eliminate all pollutant discharges which is a pretty locky desire The naal Waters by 85 and they did that very very well it over this is the merac river now I live just a mile up the hill people are jet skiing and fishing and having a grand all time L's got a swimming beach in the fire backround the natural Rivers is a Scenic Waterway now they have fishing tournaments it's a beautiful thing I like to go kaying on it still very nice so again what came out of the Clean Water R is National pollutant discharge elimination system that's what regulates all discharges to the waterways of the US any treatment plant that is a direct discharger has a nift's permit whether it's a municipal plant or an industrial plant again I had one because I was a direct discharger even though I wasn't a municipal operation and permits and take a look at a permit now they just get larger and larger and larger with the stuff that's being thrown in there where you can discharge what your allowable flows are all all sorts of they break them down by seasonal limits for various things very important that operators understand what's going on there how they're going to monitor and report all that laid out there in very very detailed this this is uh being in this business is kind of strange when you talk to people you familiar with this guy up here in the Upp [Music] corner I the more iach a fewer people know who that is kids what do you know uh that that Ed Norton up there in the upper left corner Ed Norton was on a TV show with Jackie gleon called The Honeymooners and he is today the only sewer worker ever to be on TV know the show with the SE work to show the difference Ed was a great guy but you know you wanted a friend he was right there with you all the time but he was about a four Watt bul when you tell people what you do that's kind of what's the matter with you job someplace is actually AAL lot of uh the operations challenge uh water environment Federation has competition with Wastewater operators every year we do it regionally with NOA we just did it in conjunction with NAA last uh spring uh a competition between operators in five different categories and it's really quite something if you ever get a chance to go to even to the spring meetings something to watch these guys go to work very quite a bit different from here to there the amount of Technology involved in these things so we look at Wastewater areas that uh people can get involved in uh we have the collection systems collection systems are what we used to call sewers but sewers is kind of a nasty name now so we we call them collection Systems Operations that's where all the fun is if you ask me there's maintenance the lab which does a lot of the uh analyses for the operation helps a lot with process control and certainly is the management uh which is why we' developed our Management training program to try to drive people into that position so when we talk about waste water you kind of know what it is but really if we break it down a little further what are we talking about don't might sound there but we know what goes down there yeah domestic wastewaters from residences schools commercial establishments industry we also have in most communities we have storm water mixed in with our waste water much as we'd like to separate it we still have a lot of that getting in there look at Sun sheet pretty much comes from everywhere we talk about collection systems we have a sanitary sewer which will handle domestic Wastewater from houses from Industries and what have you uh you may also have storm sewage which are totally separate ideally every town should have separated system rain water is just water it really doesn't need to be treated we don't need the extra volume going through a plant just uh wasting some money on it but again we're in an old part of the country where if there's a pipe on the ground you might as well use it so we have a lot of cities that still have a lot of combined SS that means everything goes into one pipe and that's why Island got that extra billion gallon of rain we also have pump stations we're not living in flatland Illinois we've got to get over the hill so we've got pump stations out there to help get us over those high points we look at what's in there two major components that we deal with are biochemical oxygen demand bod and total suspended solids TSS uh in the initial uh nippies permits these limits were set at 3030 those two prime things that they were out to reduce we have some some amount of inorganics those are dealt with through a preliminary system try to remove those as much as possible we also have the pathogens what the pathogens are disease those are the disease carrying bacteria we don't know who they are so we treat all of this water as though it's pathogenic and disease caring so we got to be very careful it's one of the concerns that working in these facilities and we also Al have the nutrients this is the big issue now uh because we did a very good job on reducing bod and TSS that's pretty simple job really uh the nutrients is the whole other issue talking about nitrogen and phosphorus those are the components that cause the urif foration might have grown up in an area where down the road you had a nice Pond that you could use all summer long now it's just a bog because it's filled up with weeds and everything they die off and slowly choke though so four components of Wastewater that we have to consider uh first of all the hydraulic when we talk about the hydraulic component we're talking about the float to the treatment plan chemically we have largely organic matter we're concerned with but we also still have to be concerned with some of the in physically temperature color odor and we have solids and solids of various types we have floatable settable suspended and dissolved about these in a little bit more detail from a biological standpoint we have organisms that work under various situations largely we're dealing with aerobic bacteria they like free dissolved oxygen in order to survive much the way we do we also have anerobic bacteria who function very well in the total absence of oxygen we try to avoid that as much as possible because they tend to stink the place up but there is a time when they work to our advantage so we've made do that at some point but largely we're talking about this middle one here facultative bacteria they'll adjust to the situation if you have oxygen terrific they'll use it if you don't have oxygen they'll find another source of energy so and of course we have the pathogens and the non-pathogen so hydraulically we talk about the float of the plant just you yourself probably 60 70 gallons a day when you Encompass everything else with going to work and everything else that happens through the course of the day we're up is about 150 160 gallons a day per person so if you don't how many people are in town you can kind of guess the size of the system what this particular graph is showing you is What's called the dial effect it reflects the ACT uh flow to a treatment plant based on the activities of people over the course of the day what you see here is if you start here at 12: midnight uh we got a flow rate of about 2.6 million gallons and it just drops off steadily down till about 5:00 everybody's home and in bed you got some 24-hour operations late night at Taco Bell and that sort of stuff but not much is going on so the flow drops off then at 5:00 what happens the alarm goes off you got to get up got to get kids ready for school you got to take a shower Dunkin' Donuts is backed up into the street everything now it's Flo goes up dramatically up to midday Peaks off a little bit I guess taking a cesta or something but 5:00 at night now you got to do the laundry you got to give the kids a bath it bumps up again and then slowly goes up this will vary considerably depend on the size of the facility in a small town you see something as dramatic as this a deer island it's basically a flat line they get stuff 35 miles away from framing here so you know really balances out quite a bit what we're seeing here is the difference between this the bottom line is you see that same sort of dial effect going over the course of the week and the upper line indicates what happens during the rainy season all that additional rain water getting in requiring you to work that much harder but basically you're treating the same amount of constituents except for the fact that a lot of it's just water enough and this is the problem two things that are causing that issue even if you have a separated sewer system as what we call I and I first eyes inflow inflow is a result of poor condition of your collection system cracked pipes broken pipes fully installed pipes bad joints rain water comes percolates through the ground as you want it to but then it sees this big 36 in pipe that's just open space it's a whole lot easier to go in there that def fight it way through the gravel and it comes and that's just extra FL going the plant make life po we got there was that's infiltration yeah is inflow inflow is illegal connections roof Cutters a very common thing throughout the Boston area been a lot of work done to remove those things some pumps that are hooked up into your waste system should not be there it just be pumped back outside and this is uh this bottom picture with the smoke coming out of the front yard is a technique that collection system operators will do from time to time to tie to attack down to Legal connections so they'll put a little smoke bomb in the sewer and see where it comes out could be quite humorous sometimes out of their house [Laughter] going the other issue that uh is an issue a problem particularly during Heavy Rain period is what we've referred to as fat soils and greases or fog grease and oil should not be dumped down into the system baking grease should not go down there well I'll run the hot water throw a little Dawn there and Chase it out at some point it's going to hit some cold pipe and just play it out the top picture is a nice clean pipe the bottom one is after years of being down the street with the Clam Shack and whoever thing is as that pipe diameter clogs up with grease its ability to take flow is greatly reduced so when you do get the big rain you've got a problem RS and what is being done that's what happens when the big rain comes and it can't fit through that pipe anymore for any number of reasons that is a violation that's a sanary sewer overflow the permit does not say you can discharge there and really the when it comes to Fat soils and greases it's actually the homeowners that are the biggest problem much more so than a lot of the restaurants though they are can be an issue restaurants have grease traps installed not always installed properly uh they're inspected generally by the health department who doesn't necessarily understand how these things work so that could be an issue but there we go not good you may have heard the uh term combin sewer overflow this is a situation uh that's installed in a collection system in order to protect the plant dur an ex High flows uh when you think of it and we'll learn about these guys next week but we're dealing with single cell bacteria 95% of the organisms in the wastewater treatment are single cell bacteria and if you just triple the flow through a plant they can't swim upstream that well and if you don't protect your plant you're liable to lose all of your bugs to the river it's not a good thing so in high flow situation combined sewer overflow and what we see here is the dry weather your collection system is built such that your typical flows will hit some sort of a barrier and continue on to the pow publicly owned treatment works a treatment plan an extremely high flow it will allow a certain amount of that to go straight to the river unfortunately what that generally does is causes all sorts of grief with uh the residents uh shuts down swimming beaches from time to time it can be folks out in New York you canar with the ganas canals bit kind of tells you what's happening there if you ever saw that video it'd be really nasty during the San uh combined to overlow increasing leaves are being uh set up this so you Bost and how many they had they've reduced them they've closed 32 out of 84 at least in the time of this slide reduced quite a bit a lot of them are being designed so that they actually have some amount of treatment they'll remove grit and solids and they'll also disinfect so you're not maybe putting water out there but at least you're taking care of the pathogens and the whole collection system is being under put under scrutiny through a process that we refer to as seom capacity management operation and maintenance it basically says that you have to maintain your collection system you have to inspect it on a regular basis find those leaks cut out the tree roots and all that stuff deal with the uh grease issues there been increasing enforcement on that end over the past several years uh physically when we look at this water coming into the plant it's typically a gray to a light brown can vary depending on what industri it's putting in there it when it's fresh it has a musty odor you can imagine that should not be obnoxious if it's got that rotten eggy smell then it's definitely old and that can happen for a variety of reasons and has to be dealt with from a temperature standpoint we get what we get it's a lot of water we can't heat it up we can't cool it this time of year the water coming into the plank gets down close towards 50° fah pretty well insulated but still the cold will get down there summertime it's up around 70° and what that does to us is we have to operate our plants slightly differently in the winter time from we will in the summer because much like us bugs don't do as well in cold water water is they wouldn't warm water so we have to adjust to that as the seasons change and again from the solid standpoint we have floatable settable suspended and dissolved if we were to take a one liter sample of our Wastewater Comm PL do a solid analysis on you would find that really 99.9% of that inflow is this water all of this work is done for one or 1% of what comes we have settleable solids these are uh solids that if we take a sample set the jar on the bench let it sit there for about a half an hour they're all going to drop to the bottom of the jar the nons settleable solids that stuff is just going to hang there make that water look murky no matter how long it sits it's colloidal material is very small same density as water it's got no reason to go up down sideways and then we have the larger portions dissolved solids soluble material it doesn't settle out do filter out that's where we really rely on the organisms to do the work you see this picture is I'm Hof cones this is how we test for settleable solids basically a a 1 hour test you put a one liter sample into the cone let it sit for 45 minutes at that point you take a stirring bar and just gently rub the wall to make sure nothing's clinging you give it another 50 15 minutes and it's a direct read you can see what's coming into the plant that bottom portion those are the settleable solids after primary treatment it should be nothing there remove those quite easily you get a little bit of floatable Stu but we have no measurement for that organically again dealing with human waste animal waste whatever you grind up in your uh kitchen sink disposal all comes down to us and it's measured as bio biochemical oxygen demand biochemical oxygen demand is indicator of the organic strength of the Wastewater it's not a real thing it's a kind of a weird uh test it's a strange way to run an operation another test you can do to get some ideas to the strength of the uh organic matter in your waste water is a chemical oxygen cod cod is a chemical digestion of organic matter the difference being a bod test is a 5-day test take a test a sample today we're going to prepare it put it in an incubator at 20° C 5 days has to be in the dark you don't want to generate any algae growth because algae was we read the amount of oxygen in this sample before we put it in we read how much is out there and we do a calculation again this is a permit limit on any treatment plant so the weird thing is you find out 5 days from now that your plant's in trouble not a fun way to run a CLD you can get an answer in about 3 to four hours my operation was completely different in that I had seven different production areas that could drop anything at any time of day I couldn't wait 5 days to tell if I was in trouble so we ran cods on a regular basis but by and large EPA wants to stick with bods as their their test we have lot things to worry about certain amount of alkalinity coming in you may need to adjust that time to time we'll talk about when that's required are in Organics we have nitrogen and phosphorus those are the nutrients we're going to be dealing with sand and grit this time of year particularly in a combined system we've got salt and sand throwing all over the streets then it rains it all comes into the plant we've got that extra loading of that St coming in our pH doesn't vary too too much we have to maintain that make sure it's in the proper ranges for the various operations we're doing whether doing nitrification or phosphorus removal orp some plants are using that as a method for control if you look at a total analysis of our Wastewater coming in IM uh suspended solids coming in on on average somewhere around 200 migrs per liter milligrams per liter pots per million pretty much interchangeable you want think of it that way our settleable solid a small amount our VOD this varies considerably from Community to community some are down 150 some are up at 300 uh it's also a part of how tight the collection system is that's typical range somewhere 150 to 300 is pretty normal if you did a cood you'd find you can build up a relationship between the two you can get some meing out of that uh nitrogen coming in at 40 we're going to have to get down to very low single digits phosphorus not a big number but what we're looking at now is 0.1.2 100 pots per billion not easy to do the sulfates sulfates are only a problem if we go uh towards an anerobic situation because that's where that R egg smell going and this this one right here is one of my favorite ones this is total CS we use col form or a particular bacteria we use them as an indication of various things when we're disinfecting if we've done a good job so uh they're very prolific they're everywhere they're in the ground you're probably carrying around a few billion yourself right now but this is what's coming in in 100 Mil basically a shot glass they have a shot glass we've got uh let's see that's 10 million to 100 million organisms in that one little bu those probiotic pills you ever seen those it's like 10 billion in one of those capsules yeah you try to keep conditions aerobic as much as possible aerobic bacteria use free molecular oxygen they do a very good job of it anerobic bacteria when all oxygen is gone they're going to turn on that and that's when things get kind of nasty facultative organisms can go back and forth and that's what the majority talk about our our fabri there's no way to tell who's who we just assume they're all bad and deal with them as such so how do we do this we want a treatment PL here the term pow publicly owned treatment plan it's a nice little small one I couldn't tell you where the heck it is but it's a nice little plant pretty compact probably doing a million million and a half a day something about that size uh this is Manchester New Hampshire it's a 32 million gallon plant it's right up there along the marac river you ever FW out of Manchester Airport you want to bu this and then there deer island was 350,000 Gall today 350 million gallons today huge huge complex out there in Boston Harbor you can take tours of this place it takes quite a while to walk around it the unfortunate thing about it is you really don't see much of the water most of the water you see is Boston Harbor it's all largely closed system until the very end right before it discharges out to the Bay so really all we're doing with this process is what nature would normally do wejust a little smarter a little faster we don't have time in patient that nature does and we've got some physical some chemical but largely a biological process and plants are designed to treat the waste water so our effluent does not harm the intended use of the water body to which it discharges so what you see here is uh pretty much a basic flow diagram of everything that would happen in a treatment plan if you did everything everybody follows the water line which is the arrows that run across the top of the page everybody's going to do that one device or another and there's a lot of different ways that this can be done this bottom portion varies considerably from plan to plan uh dealing with the solids that we take out of this Wastewater uh is quite a bit of work uh largely a physical operation with some chemistry thrown in to facilitate it um but it takes a lot of equipment and small plants don't necessarily want to invest that much money in equipment that they don't run continuously larger plants will do that so everybody's going to go through a point where they're going to thicken up their material and then they may send it to a large plant to have them finish it off I've seen that before all right so we'll break down and get a little more detail on some of these it our collection systems again work of pipes tunnels and cars designed to take the Wastewater from the source to the treatment sanitary sewers residential commercial institutional industrial and whatever squeaks in where it's not supposed to go storm sewers are just storm runoff ideally that should be separated and go straight to the river and you you'll find a lot of them have been labeled don't this that or the other thing down there because it's going straight to the but again we still have a lot of combined sewers out there there various types of piping going on out there there's concrete there's steel there's plastic worked up uh you'll drive around you'll notice little units like this from time to time and they're just little pump stations what this says is you've got a sewer system in some part of town but then you've got to get over the hill to get to the treatment plant so you're going to have pumps in there so this is uh showing you some of the aspects of a collection system by and large Engineers will do their best to have this water flow by gravity let gravity do its job let it run downhill and that's what we call a gravity main got a manhole and the piping between this man hole and the pump station or what have you just runs at a certain slope so the we maintain the Flow by gravity once we get into that pump station we have to go over that high point now we've got a pump this system is under pressure we call that a force mate and there's there's parameters for these things and we design these collection systems to operate whether it's a force man or gravity n at a certain velocity that velocity average of 2 ft per second we want that velocity because anything that gets into that system we want to make it to the treatment plant so solids are in there and if our velocity is too slow they settle out in the pipes they clog things up it's not good so we want at least 2 fet per second get that stuff going in again seom and Massachusetts now has updated all of their regulations such that they have seom wording in there the seom regulations were started being developed back in the 1990s but never got approved by Congress so they just kind of hung out there and they were kind of a gray area for a long time now EPA and the states have stting put it into actual Nifty permits requiring plants to do it if you read the mass regulations there's about two and a half pages in there just dealing with the seom issue on mapping out your system how often you're going to TV it how often you clean it jetting and all that stuff to deal with situations like this Roots stuff like that infiltration I just saw one recently oh you just heard about Detroit and that whole neighborhood that was sinking in but that is infiltration you think of it I've got a bed or a broken pipe every time it rains water flows into that pipe and every time the water flows into that pipe it takes some of that soil with it too at some point there's no soil left to support anything that comes down the street and you know Honda Civic drops through the street and goes away actually happened up in Nashville a couple of years ago fortunately it was early in the morning so it wasn't much traffic going down the street street opened up boom God just dropped into it if you went by on Sunday afternoon you never know anything happened they just filled it back in and paved over it never fixed the pipe what do you think happened two weeks later opened up again lost another car I said hey we got a broken pipe we got to fix that but that's soils and green big issue again it rides on the surface of water every time it water rises up and hits the cold pipe it just sticks and slowly chokes up that pipe and we end up with this situation uh this also not ends up in the street but also may end up in people's basement and all that stuff expensive fix for it you we talked about the combined s overflow operation now this is showing you on the it's set up with a cyclone system so that it takes out the grit may also get disinfected before it actually discharges into the system so we use the term pre-treatment pre-treatment is any treatment that's done to waste water outside the confines of the pow if the uh the city is dosing lift stations with sodium hypochloride or potassium permanganate to keep odors down that's technically pre-treat and they do that because uh you go into uh you know as towns expand they put in 150 houses and there's a pump station everybody goes to work that stuff just sits there all day and the thing of it is from the moment you flush the bugs are at work they've got food they've got the bugs you help put them there and they do their thing so the oxygen the system slowly depletes and you start to go anerobic and those station just sit there all day because nobody around flushing anymore they get kind of smelly so they got do of that that technically at least in massachus should be done by a certified operator industry has to pre-treat talking about uh inorganics that may come into the system and Massachusetts has industrial certification to help control these things there are chemicals there are metals that are not beneficial to the operation of bacterial treatment and those have to be be kept out of the system so that comes under the category of pre-treatment the towns and we'll talk about the whole system municipality has a pre-treatment program where they actually oversee Industries write them permits and monitor them to make sure that they're not sending stuff to the plant that will be detrimental to their operation that's pre-treat any facilities is part of the Nifty permit any Pow with a design uh flow of 5 billion gallons a day or better has to have a pre-treatment program in in progress they have to have one if you're less than five they may make you have one if you have a significant industrial user in town that could really blow out your plant I've got a 2 million gallon plant but I'm getting 150,000 gallons a day from XYZ Chemical Company I have to make sure that I'm watching them on a regular basis to make sure they don't do something and again Clean Water Act in 72 initially targeted Municipal operations uh amendments to the federal Water Pollution Control Act in 1977 started address Industries because so we spent a lot of money making these plants nice make them operate well industry is still messing things up so we got to take care of that so they started addressing them in 77 and and again in the 80s they came up with what they call General prohibitions these are things that industry cannot Cent to a PW again it's a general prohibition introduction of pollutants to a treatment plant that will interfere with the operation of the treatment plant including interference with its use or the disposal of Municipal sludge they can't send anything in there that will be bad for the organisms mess up the way they work or mess up the way you get rid of your Sledge When you boil it all down what happens in these plants is we're taking organic matter that we refer to as bod and we're got to turn it into bu then we have to get rid of all those bus so we have to get rid of these things somehow I give you a situation that uh happened up in clouth New Hampshire in 2003 uh dry cleaning operation lost some of his dry cleaning fluid through the sewer it blew out his plant killed the bugs he had no treatment PL so right there he's in trouble because if you cause the treatment plant to go in violation you're responsible for it from an industrial standpoint the other problem was by New Hampshire's hazardous waste mixture rule all of the sledge that was in their system at the time whatever thousands of pounds that may be was now hazardous waste because it had that dry clean food in there it to be an expensive problem at that point you can't do that introduction of pollutants that will pass through basically big longchain organic molecules we've got 8 to 12 hours in a treatment Clinic it's like you sitting down with the 3-foot subway you're not going to get that done at lunchtime what are you going to do with it well they can't treat it all in 8 to 12 hours so it just passes through untreated ends up in the river that's a no no as far as uh industry supposed to be and this one basically rehashes the first one anything that keeps you from recycling the water or the sludge well General prohibitions any Bo to dance around a general prohibition I could probably do it if I wanted to they said okay we'll be more specific these are things that cannot go to a treatment plan pollutants that create a fire or explosion Hazard anything with an open cup flash point less than 140 degrees fah solvents fuels that sort of stuff stuff that go boom anything that's corrosive including a discharge with a pH less than 5.0 that's EPA rules Massachusetts set the limit at 5.5 and no upper limit this is Louisville Kentucky I left Kentucky in the August of 80 so I just missed it uh you can see some holes in the street there's a roson Purina has a plant in Louisville Kentucky making some sort of chow horse chow dog chow cow Chow I don't know and uh as part of the process they have they extract oils out of and to extract you out of soybeans they use hexan which is an extremely volatile solvent well they lost a fair amount of hexane to the Sewer being that lighter than water floats on the surface there was enough oxygen around and it's a true story two ladies on their way to breakfast that morning drove over a manhole something on their car provided the ignition source and manholes for two miles went boom bo bo bo my God was cool as a traffic helicopter in the sky at the time watching this three FL can't do that it's not a good thing low PH largely to protect the collection system in addition to protecting the organisms op is the pipes rot out boom next thing you noce another truck falling through the street solids are viscous pollutants the amount that obstruct flow in the collection system of the treatment plant nothing that can plug up the piping I go to the extreme say and uh take our friends out in Deerfield at the Yankee Candle they got a back of candle wax they don't like they can't just send that to the store things up any plut and discharge in quanties concentrations that will interfere again Metals certain Organics can't be discharged in that down there it interferes with the process see something Metals primarily are the biggest problems cadmium you know you start to inhibit the process of one pot per million you're in total upside of 50 uh next ni nickel's pretty low too zinc half a p per million doesn't take a lot to really mess up the bugs they don't like that stuff so that is prohibited discharges with temperatures above 104 degrees fah 40° C when it reaches the treatment plant that's pretty much the drop dead temperature for the organisms that's why that's there and the ones that'll just pass through cause it petroleum oil non-biodegradable cut oil big organic molecules as F on Tri anything that causes a safety issue for The Operators of the collection system and this one's for the midnight hauler truck to haul pollutants accepted discharge points designated by the PW that's not designated by the pow unless you're in Jersey good time for how we doing any questions there yeah so friendly a reminder folks you can use the chat function on the sidebar um I don't have any questions yet uh but feel free at any time shoot me a question and J Tak a break like he is now uh we can feel those questions so again you just want to hover your mouth at the top see like a green bar click exit full screen and then you can use that chat function to ask questions so I don't know if you want to take a quick break now or keep going uh yeah I think it's a good take take seven minutes let's take a 7 minute break and we'll get started at around 10 playing soliter thank okay folks we're going to start up again so we going talk about uh talk about uh R treatment that's outside the PW now we're inside the plant the first step that we have is what we call preliminary treatment yeah that's where we are on our flowchart rad bar and this is the section of the plant we refer to as the head works again if if you think about it uh this waste water is traveled some distance spend on the sides of your town deer Islands traveled 35 miles from Framingham just to get to Boston uh other a smaller but depending on p cycles and stuff this is the first time this water sees the light of day it's been confined to the collection system all this time the bugs have been doing their thing the oxygen levels are at varying degrees uh of uh functionality uh if you may have none at which point the stuff that comes into the plant will smell pretty badly tend to be pretty dark in color it's on septic uh other stuff should be essentially gray to light brown and shouldn't be all that obnoxious first time it comes up today so this picture is showing you uh headworks building off there on the right at upper Blackstone water pollution of batement District this is a regional facility here in Massachusetts just outside of Wister uh it's a 100 million gallon plant uh it actually has two headworks buildings the one you see on the right is the one that operates all the time then the old one that's barely visible on the left uh is there for high flow conditions so preliminary treatment is there to remove untreatable solids we're essentially running a biological process we taking out things bugs can't eat again when I'm talking about bugs I'm talking about single cell bacteria they can't eat golf balls they can't eat 2x4s K up caps whatever and if you talk to anybody works in the collection system it'll fit through a manhole it'll show up someday volkswagons washing machine tubs it's great we also want to protect equipment this stuff goes in it can ruin pumps plug up piping we don't want that to occur and as a result it improves the operation down the street by taking this stuff up various methods that we deal with uh screening or grinding we have grip removal a separate item all together it's also again because because this is the first time this stuff comes to the light of day uh we're going to have some motor control because it can be quite nasty and we're also getting into our flow measurement we need to know what's going on oh again ideally things are going to Flow by gravity but depending on the geography of your location that may not always be possible uh this is uh the influent line to Upper Blackstone 72in line coming in they're very fortunate all their water just flows by gravity doesn't have to be pumped let it keep on running downhill this is the Vault once it was all closed up we have a vault here that allows it to go to either of the two headworks buildings depending on flow rate and it's enclosed for o control B on the other hand their waste water comes in about 30 ft below break this needs to be brought up to ground level in order to startop working with it it's totally open and if you drive by there on the right day you're going to get quite a smooth P so these are just set up though and this is the typical method of raising that incoming waste water in a facility such as that is with this screw pump screw pump can deal with anything that comes in with the influence it'll just drag it right on up the hill because it's just a powerful machine it doesn't clog it'll actually chew up some of the stuff as it goes uh these situations they are generally closed for both safety and Odor Control this one is open for some other reason so we talked about velocities through a collection system uh being generally at 2 ft per second we're still at that level as we come into the plant now the plant will have multiple units for treating and reason for multiple units is uh you want everything to run within certain parameters so I may need a lot of units online during a high rain event and they may need very few during August when I haven't seen rain in 6 weeks so we have to have some method of controlling our flow distribution to the plant so we run in those ideal ranges all the time uh this particular one's just using slide gates to allow water to go to any number of channels uh this is in Bill R their incoming flow comes in through this they call it a blossom flows up from this pipe and then they've got three different valves depending on how many clarifiers they're going to operate again this is just to keep things within our prescribed operating ranges so talk about screening screening is the most common method of dealing with incoming material and we're going to remove inorganics and large stuff that will JM up pumps and stuff we don't want things that are going to settle out in our treatment plant uh tanks and such so we have trash rats we have bar screens we have Grinders also we talked about those together we're still running at essentially that same velocity we still don't want anything settling out this is a trash rack these not so common these you may find in Lagoon systems or very small operations but the principle is kind of the same we've got a series of bars that set at an angle to the waste water coming in and their space the trash rack is very crude 2 to 6 in so some big stuff will still flow through here but anything that doesn't fit between those bars gets caught on the bars and with a trash rack the manual operation somebody has to go out and actually remove that stuff physically with a rake or some mechanism the unfortunate thing is these things tend to be uh outside quite often and they're going to plug usually during the rain event we flush everything out of the sewer and that's not a great place to be during the rain event don't mind me you want true thing uh so there's a picture of a trash R very crude screening operation there we go now bar screen which is a little more common in most plants is much finer uh quarter inch to about 3/4 of an inch so it's fairly tight uh these are pretty hefty steel bars they have to take the resistance of flow that comes through the plant instead of being mechanic uh manually cleaned by sub po going out there with a rate again these channels can be about 15 ft deep they're automatically cleaned got a cleaning mechanism it's got a rate that'll just drag this material off clean it up you can see one of the rates there there are different types up there build right as it drags the material off the bars you're going to have a big flat plate we want the water to come off these things and drain back down into the channel got a couple of reasons for that okay you can see back end of the discharge here the material that comes off these is ultimately going to go to a landfill easy to dispose of but landfills are getting very particular in a lot of ways uh they don't want excess moisture we have the drain plate help keep the stuff in the system they're concerned about what we call Vector attraction vectors are nice new word for pests rats and flies and seagulls and that stuff so we have vectors they don't want to have that stuff because if we just send this stuff off loaded with organic waste that's going to be a problem now as far as cleaning these things on the automatic systems they generally work off what we call head loss head loss is the difference in water elevation upstream and downstream of the screen as that stream clogs water backs up Upstream it has to be able to get get around the stuff that's clogging we want to keep that at a minimum this is the control panel for nashwa uh they have uh this blue device here on the uh the left part of the panel is a level device ultrasonic level device that measures the height of the water Upstream of the screen we've got a little PLC in here uh that's going to control the operation of the cleaning mechanism so it's set up generally as a Time based thing it's going to run 15 minutes out of every hour so the PLC will control that it's 10:00 it'll run the cleaning device for 15 minutes then shuts down until 11: and that's all well and good but now we get a rain event comes in and we're starting to flush stuff out of the collection system so the screen clogs up faster than it would normally do that so that's where the ultrasonic level of I comes in it's set at a certain level it says if it hits this we don't care about the time anymore it's time to clean the screen so that works as a backup so that we don't plug the whole thing up and have the water open the floor that's typically the way these things are set up yeah that's that headloss that we look at we don't want it to be too big because again we want our velocity through the system to be fairly consistent so if I wait and let it build up build up build up then I clean it I'm going to get this big flush of water running through there and that's not what we want there are some that are quite classified as fine screens of very very tight spacing these can actually replace the subsequent process of primary treatment need a good strong back wash to keep them clean they starting to be more and more prevalent here's another method that can be run this a tangential screen or an O screen water just comes up and flows over this and what we have here is this isn't really a screen but a series of triangular-shaped wedge wires very closely spaced as the water flows over it those wires act like a a blade and just shave off a little bit of water and the water passes through the solid stay on top of this and eventually just dis judge off the end here again very tight screening something that's been relatively new past 10 years or so we're starting to see an increase of these are rotary screens your flow comes in there's a manifold inside this screen we got a big rotating drum with a mesh screen on there and as the water overflows the water will pass through the screen come out uh nice and clean and the solids stay inside and eventually get discharged off the end and our screenings varies considerably depending on what's going on it's changed a lot this is a picture from about 10 years ago out in Bill R you got a lot of stringy weird stuff that shows up but today this is what we dealing with oh God that so disgusting it's again I've been watching this over the past 12 years and it's amazing how it's changed and this is just we have these monster blobs in the collection system now from all these wipes mhm it's just huge absolutely huge stuff comes off by TS you're supposed to have a little diaper pil in your bathroom for those things using that stuff are those the ones that are supposedly flushable yeah they're flushable they golf balls are flushable if you got the right toilet know flushable really doesn't mean a whole lot yeah those really should not be in the system they just they plug pums and guess what operators are spending hours a day cleaning this stuff out of pumps and pipes and it's nasty they know they know not to yeah it does increasingly as plants go through upgrades uh we're starting to see this type of a setup where we're actually washing our screenings before they go to the landfill at upper Blackstone material comes off the screens hits a belt conveyor and gets deposited into this unit here uh this is what the it's called a muffin monster it's a big grinder uh this Hopper has a little tubing around the top sprays water to help wash off any Organics from the screenings uh this thing grinds everything up and then this is a a pump that will squeeze this material and push it out to go into a rolloff bin squeezes all the water out the water goes back into the system and stays there carrying the Organics hope with it this will grind up pretty much anything throw a hunk of asphalt in there will get chewed up that's somebody you're not fond of this will take care and this is what comes out at the Fire end it's dewatered consider because it's really squeez squeeze the water right out of it goes off to the roll up and not a big deal what do they do with that do they burn that what's that do they burn that no go the landfill it's buried and a ni covered roll off even that's part of the AA control now Grinders Grinders are basically the same thing that you might have in your sink you got a an incinerator or disposal unit in there the same stuff same kind of a principle the water's going to flow through here a series of bars with certain spacing anything that passes through the bars is fine but if it doesn't it's going to get chewed up by the grinder this thing just keeps going and chews it up until it passes on through another way yeah just like that other univ you can throw pretty much anything in there and grind it up well the difference between between this and screening is screening actually removes this material and you can send it out to a landfill this doesn't remove anything it just chews it up and you have to deal with it later on now grit sand hockey ground Cinders whatever type of material since inorganic type of sphere will pass through all of these screens and grinders but we need to remove it because again the bugs can't eat this stuff so the next step in our preliminary treatment all of this material needs to come out non pable material oh again this stuff is particularly nasty because it tends to be very abrasive it'll eat up pump impellers and pipe elbows and valves and all that stuff clogs pipes that will settle out in tanks and take up space that we don't want so we want this out of there so now again we're in control so we're actually going to slow the veloc of this water down from our 1 and 1/2 to 2 ft per second we had through screening down to about 3/4 to 1T per second we're going to slow it down just enough so that the dense material can settle but any organic material which is still lighter stay in suspension we don't want that settling out that has the door to the bus 34 to a foot per second cut that in half we do that by expanding the area of flow the one thing about this business is you cannot stop it no matter what's going on in your plant this water keeps on coming you can't close the Val say I'll fix this slow it down I don't have time it keeps on coming again very dense material about 100 pounds per cubic feet so it settles quite readily this is a non erated grid chamber again we've just expanded the area of flow slowed things down so that grit can settle out in this chamber and it's going to settle down into this area and on a timer this rake mechanism is slowly going to plow it down into that little sump you see up in the upper right corner there and then they've got a screw conveyor to drag that material out of there thing about it is this uh this could be amous Mass they got a system like this the material comes in goes through that flow Meers goes directly into this again it's old Wastewater so it can be rather odorous so one way that we try to do no matter what our system is we want to get some oxygen back in this water so we shut down any kind of Anor robic operation or even some of the facultative the ones that are non-rated grid Chambers tend to have a drop afterwards it's going to flow over a dam drop a couple of feet that's just enough to air rate that very well get it back up and shut down any anerobic activity now this picture is depicting an air rating grd chamber this is when we're actually going to pump air in it has two purposes we're going to freshen the waste waterer and also facilitates the settling of the grd and you see a pipe over here on the right hand side it's going to inject air and it causes kind of a swirling action inside the chamber itself as it moves through changes the apparent density of the water so material settles more readily and freshens it up at the same time uh down on the bottom of this portion here you going to have some sort of a removal system a chain and bucket or chain and flight system to take it away got drag this stuff out so this is upper Blackstone when they were going through their renovation you see the Iration pipe here outside and then uh down at the bottom is's a chain and bucket system it's going to drag the grit out of this unit brings it inside we've got a bucket elevator it's just a continuous belt with these buckets in there Scoops up material and then flings it out at the top for where [Applause] go some facilities instead of going this method pump their grit out of the chamber and run it through a cyclone Cyclones are very good for concentrating solids material comes in to this cone type device comes in tangentially material spins around the solids go to the wall and get pushed down towards the bottom Apex clear water comes towards the center and comes out through that Center pipe and this much like the screenings increasingly is being washed before we send it off we want to make sure there's no organic matter resting on it before we do they s into a tank like that the water washes off the Organics and then this screw conveyor will remove the grit to dewaters very well big classifier this is down in Wallingford Connecticut there's their Cyclones right there and here's the grit washer there's Chuck Conway's head back there [Laughter] and that's grit just what it sounds like it's grit dewaters very well you don't have to worry about moisture content with these generally off to a landfill it's gotot again things that we're concerned with uh certainly odors this T there's two smelly parts of a plant it's going to be your headworks building it's going to be your solid handling it head works because of the nature of old material coming in it's some air so we have to have OD control for that particular area and its operations the health issues this is raw Wastewater good bad otherwise we don't know we assume that it's just nasty stuff with bad bugs in it uh we have to deal with the vector attraction thing wash the Organics off our stuff before we get rid of it so it can go to the landfill and they can't get after us and the moisture content total landfill you typically have to have greater than 20% solids of whatever it is you're sending so we have to try to make sure it's dry enough to be able to go without any problem OD control these buildings tend to fall under an OD control situation as time goes on a lot of different ways of dealing with the air there's carbon absorption there's biofilters you can use chemical scrubbers with various chemicals in there worse comes the worst you use a masking agent it's just like spraying cheap perfume all around the building and it's SP as bad as the building it did before so this is upper blackstone's new uh air rated grid Chambers totally enclosed all of this white piping this is all fiberglass piping that goes off to a bof filter they do a very very good job is the bof filter here all of the uh air from this building or both buildings from their air rated grid Chambers all come through this piping and pass through this bof filter is really just uh the big tanks filled with a media could be wood chips they actually have a foundation of lava rocks remember back in the ' 80s you get a grill you had those spunky little lava rocks loaded with that and then a bunch of wood chips and organisms actually live on that media and will consume the odorant as it goes through so you walk at the end of this where it discharges you don't smell a thing that's a very very good job uh some facilities will do chemical scrubbing they'll run the air through a scrub scrubber to knock it down sodium hydroxide sodium hypochloride very common method of scrubbing lot more complicated so what you see here is acepted receiving station a very nice setit receiving station not everybody lives on a collection system and goes to a treatment plant oh whole lot of houses out there that have septic systems there's other systems out there and all of that sludge from those things need to go someplace on a regular basis you can't be like my father and run your septic system until it finally pops up in the [Laughter] backyard and so it's it's a good Revenue source for a facility but it has to be managed properly U swall plants in particular this is concentrated Wastewater uh this to Raw waste water is like espresso to alatte yeah this this is crack coc for bugs so you got to be careful with how you man this Stu and also you never know for sure what's going to be in those tanks as much as they SAR it's good stuff it's a screening device it acts as a screening unit takes out the all the Legos and the kids toys that went down the toilet they do pH readings on those to make sure that they're within ranges stu okay it's a good way to deal with things but if you look at it if you remember our solids coming in on Raw wastewaters about 200 this is what you're getting out of acept B 7,000 instead of 300 it's rough stuff you got to deal with it get the whole ammonia phosphorus thing to deal with so yeah it's not one of the nicest places in the plant and you've got the whole thing of grounding this water what's that sorry I saw drowning I could imine what is that what drowning you fall in no that's horrific that's AAL rule you do it fall it whatever happens don't fall it all sort you you know degrading uh waste water can generate methane can generate hydrogen sulfides other nasty gases so explosive toxic gases when this stuff finally comes to light uh possible you've got rotating equipment those screens as sharp as all can be by the nature of the things going on the floor's always wet in there you never know what's going to come off you got hypodermics and what have you all out there you don't be careful uh certainly we're still dealing with pathogenic bacteria uh it's not a great place to be I've worked in a lot of different uh companies lot dealt with a lot of nasty chemicals and wastewater treatment to give you just as much danger as any of those places I've ever been interesting so we've taken out the the stuff the bugs can't eat we've taken out the 2x4s and the pots and pans we've taken out the grit uh so the water is relatively clean looking uh but we need to now measure our flow it's generally at this point that we measure the flow I say Amis masses kind of an outlier they measure before they hit all of that stuff most people will wait till that's done we need to know it because we have to report that on our dmrs every month uh we need to know it because we want to run our plant we need it for process control what's our flow what's coming in what's going on uh probably the most common method of measuring flow is a partial Flume partial Flume is an open Channel flow device has three sections a converging section a throat and then a diverging section a particular Contour to the floor also set to give a certain velocity through through The Flume and we're going to measure the height of the water one/ thir the distance into that convergent section so this is a this is a little devil in b r only at 3 million gallon plant so it's kind of small so you can see the converging section there's that throat and then there's a diverging section we measure an ultronic level device measures the height of that at this point as that height the area flow changes we can calculate but our flow rate is through the plant this is upper Blackstone one of the biggest flums around probably the biggest one in the region that's about 11 ft across its throat again this is our ultrasonic level device there are other methods this is up in NASA naswa has a magnetic flow meter you can see it's a closed piece of pipe and what it does it sends a signal across this flow and it's as it's deflected it can determine the change in the velocity through that pipe we can make the calculation again at this point we're going to go into primary treatment we're probably going to have more than one clarifier for these operations that's what you see these three circular tanks behind the the blossom here the that's what we're heading next and depending on our flow rates we may need all three we may need one we may need two so we have again some method of controlling the flow to whatever number of units we need to have so we're going into primary treatment our next step yes it's a physical operation we're going to separate readily settleable solids the stuff we saw in the bottom of that I'm half cone earlier and any floatable material and it's also where we equalize side streams all of the operations that are associated with the solid handling part again when it comes to solid handling we're taking material that probably comes out to less than 1% solids and we have to get it to better than 20 so we got to squeeze all that water out that water has to come back at some point this is generally where it starts to come in these terms all meaning the same thing settling sedimentation clarification the settling of discrete particles by gravity so we're going to remove rely settable solids we're going to reduce our Bod by some percentage 30ish uh we're going to take some of our suspended solids out during this process too so that's what's going to happen in this yeah talked about that pable solids analysis this is what's coming into our primary treatment this is what it should look like afterwards nothing floating up here nothing settling in the bottom of the conve there to there that's our whole job and again what we're going to do is we're going to slow things down yet again now we're going from 1 foot per second to 1 foot per minute should look like still water in these tanks one foot per minute you're go that far in a minute that's pretty SL uh in primary settling an hour and a half to two hours is sufficient again that's probably a summertime and this is probably winter time because water's denser and the colder temperatures so we have to deal with of our expectations as a result of that this is a rectangular settler they're big tanks this a cross-sectional area there's our rectangular tank we're going to come in here at the left and again we want these to be as quiet as possible so we just can't have this flow come charging into a tank it'll cause that currence so we're going to have a baffle here to help us slow that velocity down and spread it across the entire face of the tank water's going to move at one foot per minute towards the discharge it as it does solids will slowly drop down to the floor quotables will slowly rise to the surface now at the far end we've got a baffle layer so that flowables won't continue and come out with our Eid we got a Baff that goes some distance below the surface our solids were going to drag out through another device and uh our settled water then overflows into a a trough or launder to go away another view of it it shows the actual uh Sledge scraping device what pushes solids floatables in One Direction and solids in the other so settled water at the end is going to overflow into going to pass through a wear into a trough that we call a launder you he that term we're talking about that trough that receives the the cleaner water so is the uh chain and flight system we have to have some method to keep the uh material moving out of the tank these blades uh originally were made out of wood now they're made out of fiberglass on the floor they're pushing solids towards the discharge point the ones at the surface are pushing the floatable material towards a receiving unit and which you get some little units here because this is dragging on the floor you don't want to wear out the 16t hunk of PL uh flexiglass or whatever fiberglass you've got all of these num you want replace them so we have sacrificial pieces of plastic on them called wear shoes those will wear rout rather than the entire flight it's a whole lot cheaper replac and they travel very slowly slowly as they move we don't want to generate any currents if possible this is upper Blackstone you can see the flights at the surface they're pushing uh flatable material and if you can just make it out right over this pipe change in the coloration of the water surface that's your accumulated floatables right there this pipe here is What's called the ducking wear two purposes it serves as the baffle good size diameter pipes will goes well below the surface flowables can't get past it on a timer you can see openings cut into the top of the pipe that pipe is going to rotate towards the inlet side so it goes just below the water that floatable material will flow into that pipe and then go away to receiving tank we got nice clean water on this side of it on the floor sludges push back and that's generally the case Sledge is generally pushed back towards the influent end of the pipe tank going to push it down here down into this sump and then it gets pumped into the Sol's handling unit you have baffle old baffle on these units relatively clean looking water and for many years this was the treatment for most cities primary treatment they disinfect boom they left 30% of the bod in there that water water floats up fls into this trough and travels off can also be done with a circular settling rectangulars are much more common on the primary end because economy of construction you got common walls and civil engineers build these places and that's what they like haven't picked on a civil engineer yet have I circular clarifiers and Bild Rec same thing water is going to flow into a a well here in the center it's going to slowly work its way to an overflow wear on the outer circumference of the tank let's go here there we go oh up in through here here what we've got is another baffet it's a big circular wall wases about 3 feet below the surface so the water comes in can't go straight over to the effluent it has to hit that Wall come down and slowly work its way up again one foot per minute solids drop to the bottom floatables go to the surface hopefully well is good we got a rake mechanism that's going to plow this into a well and again that gets comes off to be pumped out later there's a arm there to pick up the floatable material skims it off into a receiving unit at the surface you can see that baffle here big steel wall and then there's a right mechanism is that Sledge well down the bottom got turns very very slowly there is a for any floatable material this arm's going to pick it up and push it around and it's going to come up got this wiper here that runs it up this little ramp and'll drop down into this opening here to remove the floatables from the water Sledge goes to the bottom gets clouded to the C it's pumped away well things that we're considering is that flow rate again we want to run within certain ranges so we've got a lot of water coming in because of rain or what have you we need more clarifiers we've got a certain rate at which we want to run these in terms of hydraulic floting the type of solids that are coming in old sluds doesn't settle as well the age of the Wastewater condition of your clarifier obviously temperatures are going to affect it things don't work as well this time of year as they will in August how fast we take it out yet another factor is whatever is coming back in we have thickeners we have belt presses we have incinerator water all that stuff comes in at various times and affect things all of these materials further down the road but at the end of the day if all has gone well we've re removed 95 to 99% of settleable solids and all of the float we've lost a little bit of total solids some of our suspended solids our bod has been remove reduced that wouldn't go to 50% 20 to 30 probably and we've got a sludge that depending on how fast we withdraw it might be 4% or so is pretty decent but it's not the highest volume you got to talk about we want to run these things inin certain parameters and this is what dictates how many units we're going to have at any particular point in time have three things that we look at a wear overflow rate a service loading rate and on these solid loading doesn't really matter a wear overflow rate is gallons per day per foot of Weir again you can see 10,000 to 40,000 these things are pretty forgivable they can take quite a range of flow before they fail that's you figure out how many feet of wheel you have on your tank however it's designed and and each foot should see something in that range so if it's in August I'm going to be down around here I may be able to take some clarifiers off because I'm getting too low I don't want it to be in there too long too long it'll start to decompose it'll generate gases just totally disruptive surface loading rate is another one they're basically design factors they're not anything a typical operator looks at on a daily basis it's a design range tell you how many clarifiers you're going to have and it works back into your onm manual so when your Flows at this range you want so many clarifiers when it comes down here you'll have fewer or whatever there our primary uport relatively clean looking water ready for secondary treatment black stone is a their old secondary treatment system on either side of this channeling their primary F and again this is what we've achieved we've Comm in this amount of settes little bit of floatables and we've got virtually nothing on either end after our primary treatment got anything in the question area we don't uh online are calling in I realized I haven't opened it up to our I'm either doing too well or they fallen asleep Wonder audience you all have questions calling in two bash ask a lot we've covered sure we have question all right F be able to finish this before no probility let me take another short break and we'll hit the disinfections I'm going to jump over the AC biological treatment because that's going to take all of next week to talk about go over the various aspects of that it's more detail so we'll just jump over that and go into how we finish up the water before so all right five minute break and we'll go back to disinfection than okay we're back at it so uh I said we're going to jump over the biological process which can get uh very complicated depend on what we're trying to do uh and we just jump right forward to uh disinfection now after the biological process we go through clarification once again we have to take out all of those bugs that we generated during the process so ideally uh we've got very clean water we've got suspended solids down in the low single digit numbers really it should look like drinking water for all intents and purposes you're doing a good job the one thing that we have not done anything about at this point is the pathogenic bacteria to this point we assume they're all pathogens and we treat them as such but now we have to do something before we can throw this in the river we're going to go through disinfection now quite frequently after a clarification stuff particularly people who are dealing with phospherous removal phosphorus removal particularly if you're using the chemical which is pretty much what you have to do to get that of the numbers they're looking at uh will leave you with a very very fine flock that doesn't even settle out in our secondary clarifiers so facilities generally are going to go through a filtration step before they discharge in this situation what you see in here are sand filter is a very common method it's just a gravity filtration uh through a sand bed but at some point that sand bed needs to be backwashed to remove the material that you're filtering out and that again goes back into the system much like a drink and water plant type of an operation gra gravity uh sand filter there are a lot of other thought I had a picture here of new devices that are out there now cloth filters that sort of thing that has become a regular step in phospherous removal so we're going through disinfection and we're not sterilizing we're not killing all of the organisms in the system we're just going to kill down to a certain point where we're comfortable that the water is safe to be dealt with so and our limits uh we can be looking at various things we can be looking at the going to be coliform bacteria of some sort could be feal coliform could be total coliform look at eoli of states are doing that again generally looking at how many colonies we form in a 100 Mil sample coliforms again are just indicator organisms they're not necessarily pathogenic but they're very Stout we know that if we kill them down to a certain point then we shouldn't have to worry about anything else so common methods are chlorination chlorine has been a very common method for disinfecting for a long time we have ultraviolet radiation and ozone while it's very specialized and difficult it's starting to uh make some inroads into the process early days of disinfection liquefied chlorine gas was the method to be chosen chlorine was readily available it was very inexpensive $4.88 you got a rail car why not use it and it kills it kills very well it'll kill you if you let it yeah two and a half times heavier than air and he leaks T to pull distinctly at Flor level it's highly toxic smell it at very low concentrations uh just walk through our laundry area when my wife's doing white shirts snowing quite soluble in water uh the o shapel permissible exposure limit is half a pot per million in air half a part per million and if you read the regulation you'll also find out that OSHA states that nobody should be exposed to more than one pot per million there's not a whole lot of buffer there it shouldn't be smell but this is what happens take chlorine gas mix it with water and you form hypochlorous acid hypochlorous acid is the predominant disinfectant so we want to make sure our PHS are such that that is the ion that we're going to generate so 7 to 75 optimum pH that's what we're going to generate the most hypochlorous acid out of that solution we can go above that below that you tend to make more hypochlorite which still works but it's not quite so uh effective we can purchase this m material in three different containers uh you got a very small operation you might buy it 150 pound cylinders looks like your standard gas bottle used in an upright position it has a single valve at the top that valve has a fusible plug in it that will melt at roughly 160° fah here would take the idea being that we don't want this thing to explode it's in a fire it'll just release the gas and Fir deal with it I guess more commonly they're going to use one tons cylinders there are still number of plants in Massachusetts that are used in liquified choring gas Amis being one of them Newber Port I foret the was couple others one ton cylinder holds 2,000 PBS of liquid chlorine it's used in a horizontal position it has two valves they sit on cradles get the weight of the unit and also have rollers so that you can rotate it if you need to and you set it up so that the valves are are in a perpendicular situation one over the other and if you look internally one of those valves will take liquid the other will take Vapor off the cylinder if you got a really big plant you get one of these 180,000 lbs and this is why most plants don't use it anymore once you had this brownish Green Cloud go over the fence line kill a neighbor's dog somebody downtown says you know I heard about this hyp chloride stuff we might want to look at that is a bad day that is a really bad day there are kits for leaking valves typically you're going to have a leak on the valve of any of these American chlorine Institute has devised these three kits uh for the different units it's a very complex system we've got the a kit for the 150 PB the B kit for the one ton and the C kit for the rail cars hard to remember it Hampshire chemical we had uh we bring in hydrogen cyanide cars of the exact same design as these rail cars and we'd have to practice with these C kit units a lot of fun two ways that we can feed we can have a pressure system we could have a vacuum system the preferred method is the vacuum if I have a pressure system and I have a leak what's happening but chlorine gas is leaking out right it's under pressure I have a vacuum leak what happens I'm just going to suck an my system worst I get is a bad bacterial sample at the end of the day it's a lot safer that St but said with one t cylinders they're in a cradle they're on scale so that you can see how much you're using uh can take liquid we take a liquid we run it through an evaporator it evaporates quite readily just some warm water is all it takes there or can take gas off the top of the cylinder right through uh should there be a leak on one of these units you never put water on the leak you put water on the leak now you're forming hydrochloric acid and a small leak is fast becoming a large leak the reason that they're on rollers is if you have a leak on your liquid valve you disconnect and you roll it so that it leaks gas any idea why just evaporates in the air the liquids will spill the clean up and the gas just vanishes that's not it no the liquid when the liquid evaporates it generates 479 times volume whereas the gas comes out it just is what the gas comes out you don't fill up the room too fast gas chlorinators nothing of control in basically just a little ROM meter sitting on top of the 50 pound Earth the one ton units are much more complicated stuff a chlorine feed room has to be completely isolated from any other employee area you can't access it from the office the warehouse any place else you come in from outside you go outside that's so if there is a leak it doesn't contaminate other areas again leaks it's 2 and a half times the density of air so it's going to leak on the floor ventilation will be at floor level to draw it away again most people have abandoned liquefied chlorine gas in favor of sodium hypochloride sodium hypo is just chlorine bleach five times more concentrat about 15% chlorine again when you add it to the water you're going to form that hypoc chloris acid keeping in that same PH range but you don't have any gas clouds going away you just have tank trucks rolling over in your driveway or something like that you got a drum of material and a little uh Heering pump you can go and chlorinate any place you want works very well easy to control now there are some systems very small systems might be an alternative system or it might be a lagoon system that will use calcium hypochloride if you've ever had a pool and use HTH that's what we're talking about 70% chlorine these tablets got to be very careful on high Sora but again once you add it to uh the Water hypoc chloris acid same deal what you've got is these tablets inside of some unit and then you just regulate how fast the water goes through and dissolves the tablets that's very common with Lagoon systems where you don't have somebody hanging around all day long so we have what's called a dosage we're going to dose a certain amount of chlorine it's it's based on fluorate generally and pounds and what we do is we want to make sure we've got enough in there to get the kill that we're looking for and we also want to have a safety Factor we call a residual so our do is our demand the amount we need to get the kill plus the residual so if I need four to get the kill that I'm looking for and I'm going to have a residual of two to my safety factors in case things change as things go on may not be a like SYM I'm going to dose it 6 milligrams per liter very simple operation not harder here's one thing that may complicate it though it's what we call breakpoint chlorination when treatment plants uh dose chlorine they are generally looking for total chlorine residual a drinking water plant in all probability will go for a free chlorine residual it's a whole different thing because drinking water is generally dealing with pretty clean water nothing else around we've got a lot of other different stuff such as nitrogen compounds and various other things that react with the ox the chlorine chlorine a very very strong oxidizer so if there's something around to react with it'll do it and if we have nitrogen compounds in there they'll form chloramines which will still do some disinfection just not as effective it's called combined chlorine but this breakpoint idea is uh takes a little while to kind of finally grasp the whole thing took me a couple years before I fully understood what the heck they were talking about okay if you have free chlorine that means I'm reading free chlorine there's a chlorine ion floating around that water there a PO combined chlorine which is a chloramine ammonia and chlorine combined put them together and you've got total chlorine a break point is when you've reacted every possible thing in there and for every little bit of chlorine you put in you get that amount of free chlorine in your test so what's happening through here okay do I'm going to add chlorine I've got still got some bacteria in there I haven't removed all of my solids I've got some other components maybe a little bit of metal or something like that I put chlorine in and I see no chlorine at all it's forming chloride it's breaking down other materials once those are gone I'm going to get some combined chlorine it's going to stock ammonia compounds forming chloramines which would show up under a combined chlorine test but I wouldn't have any free chlorine I'm going to keep adding chlorine to the point where I now break down all of those chloramines break down and I get to a point called the break point where now if I add 1 milligram per liter of chlorine I get 1 milligram per liter free chlorine in my test for drinking water that's not hard for us out here this is a huge amount of chlorine to get to a free chlorine so we don't we go based on a total chlorine combined plus free generally no free so as long as we get in the kill we're good with that control it we control it manually thr proportion residual control orp the various ways of controlling our dosages typically it's a flow proportion we got a flow meter that sends a signal to a controller says add this much chlorine as the flate goes up chlorine goes up as flate goes down chlorine goes down ideally everything works fine but again things could happen maybe get a little upset in your clarifier something like that stuff could go by that you wouldn't have enough there we do a residual chlorine we're actually going to sample after our treatment with the chlorine which is a 30 minute delay time and say okay I want to have so much of a residual and that's going to tell it how much chlorine to add into the system and then we get into more complicated instrumentation systems compound Loops where I'm going to feed based on a flow meter plus I got a residual as a backup to override if I need to and then there's Cascade control where controlers the talking to controlers get St complex all to make sure you get the test that you're achieving for chlorine disinfection to work ideally you've got 3 minutes detention time in your contact chamber at average flow you need the time for it to be done you need good mixing because all the organisms have to be exposed to the chlorine you good mixing it and this is the prescribed design the serpentine type of a tank you find very few that look this nice that's Nash not so nice deep but not very nice well again chlorine was cheap so say okay we'll disinfect they just throw in chlorine like crazy so they had this huge residual going into the river and the fish were turning white so you said oh back off here come on you're going to have to decorin we can't have that much residual choring going into the waters so now they limit so we have to dechlorinate you can have as much residual as you want to your safety Factor but you have to get rid of it before you can discharge and they again pretty small numbers I think the upper Blackstone at 12 pots per billion so originally when liian gas was so popular so was sulfur dioxide a very nasty liquefied gas ugly terrible now I don't know anybody that's still using that that's gone uh sulfur salt sodium sulfite sodium bisulfite and various Solutions you can buy SO2 uh colorless heavier than air very corrosive form sulfuric acid the bisulfites work very well it's just another tank truck coming in the storage tank but it is corrosive and you don't want to bathe in it uh they like this stuff because same Vapor density you could use the same regulator on your uh cylinders very detectable it's gone and it was also basically one for one so if you had a two milligram per liter residual you put in 2 migs per liter SO2 everybody was happy Bill Rick has that little unit it's a instantaneous reaction forms a chloride it's just a little salt now and nobody cares but it right at the end of your contact chamber a lot of facilities that we'd want to deal with chemicals uh I don't want employee exposure I don't want tank trucks I don't want storage tanks and pumps and leaks all of that stuff I'm just going to write a check to National Grid and be done with it so they're drawn with ultraviolet radiation it's also very popular with small systems what it is is light bulbs and water what's the Worst That Could Happen a lot of light bulb in water as you can see again no transport no storage no hazardous chemicals there's no duv like this decl some savings there but here's the difference nobody dies chlorine kills UV doesn't kill anything it's a physical process that inhibits the organism got to have the right amount of energy to do it and the light has to be absorbed by the organism that's why you see so many bulbs in that channel we talk about UV light the range of ultraviolet light is 40 to 400 NM the light that's effective for disinfection is about 254 nmet so the majority of the light emitted by these bulbs is in that range and it messes up their DNA so that they can't reproduce they've got a lifespan of minutes basically so you throw them in the river they die with no Offspring nobody cares but they don't die but from this anyways bu of where the light comes out 53.7 and there's various types there's types where all the wirings above the water level some go down inside uh there issues again the light has to hit the organism so if you have curved Wastewater you got solids in there that could be a problem that's blocking the light these are a lot of them have wipes on them so that if material collects the the bulb actually sits in a quartz sleeve for protection but materal could collect on that sleeve and block the light beam so they' have wipers that would go on it had a lot of trouble with the early versions they were snapping the buls which is not good because they contain mercury you need a lot of them so if you have turbidity issues could be an issue lots and lots of Lights uh these are fairly old units down in Wallingford Connecticut each one of these boxes indicates a set of lamps down inside that channel concerned with high suspended solids you got to make sure your bulbs are transmitting properly metals can be a problem hardness collecting all the the sleeves and Organics if uh go to fast food restaurants anymore inside Hospital look around see if you can find a blue light on the wall yeah get a kick out of this I've seen it in restaurants i' I've actually seen it down a Ley Clinic working light up on the wall it's an ultra violet light supposedly to disinfect you know it's disinfecting about four square fet of wall where it's shining because you can't see it the rest of the room they K ozone ozone is an extremely strong oxidizing agent very strong it has has to be done on site it's very complex and difficult to deal with in the case here Europe do they do all sorts of crazy things over there they they've been pretty good with it and I'm starting to see some inroads here in the United States over using ozone as a disinfecting agent but it's not a popular thing we tried it at Hampshire for a while on a different process since what trouble in it's worth Ali coros reactive uh there actually talk about chemical pre treatment uh there's a t-shirt manufacturer up in Key New Hampshire Three Dog Moon I don't if you ever heard of those guys and they were giving the Keen treatment plant fits when they did the red and the blue dies for their shirts color would travel right through the plant and drive them nuts so they actually installed an ozone system to knock that color down chlorine wasn't working so they had to go to Ozone very expensive system but it's keeping them out of trouble with the treatment PL so so bod's down suspended solids down maybe our nutrients are down where they should be uh we got nice clean water we've killed off the pathogens Le everybody to a point where we're happy one final thing to do before we let this go the last time this water saw in air was back in our biological process we have to pump a lot of air in there to keep the bugs happy so it went through a clarifier which is probably 2 to three hours went through a contact tank a half an hour so there's still a little bit of food a little bit of bugs and no oxygen so what we have to do is reate because now this is going into the stream and all this is part of is going down to what we refer to as the assimilative capacity of the river our water is now going to go into this receiving stream and we want it to disappear in that stream as quickly as possible we don't want you to go in sample a mile Downstream and say Do's down3 Because treatment plants got into oxygen in their water when they throw it in want to go away so permits invariably will say that you must have a dissolved oxygen content your effluent of a minimum of 6 milligrams per liter you got to get that in there and again depends on how things go uh this is Wallingford Connecticut they actually have to pump air in based on the way their system works so these air it likely uh would have may be in our grit chamber uh Bill R the same deal just the way it works they have to pump air in to get that dissolved oxygen up upper Blackstone is very fortunate and their water all flows downhill when it comes out of their contact chamber it goes over a wear similar to this and then drops about 8 fet you got six and a heartbeat by doing that uh some other things you go to Brockton it Cascades somewhat similar to this down a series of steps and all that just that little bit of activity is enough to get that oxygen there for free so now when it goes in it doesn't kill off the oxygen in the Stream it just kind of Blends right in and hopefully you never see anything this is something that we may see uh one of these days as particularly out west where a lot of uh this water could be used for irrigation hey wait stop taking the nitrogen phosphorus out we'd like that stuff wouldn't that be nice yeah blah blah blah uh where's my test your Waters upstream and downstream to see what the effect of your waste water is on the receiving stream how fast it Blends in it's that ass simulative capacity how fast does your material disappear temperature wise dissolved oxygen pH uh our discharge went into the meramac river we had a pipe that extended out to the midpoint of the river had 14 nozzles to help blend that stuff out they call mixing zones what you got to do to mix that into the river as quickly as possible so that there's no actual detriment of the whole thing the other thing that occurs uh here we go testing for various things is what they call whole effluent toxicity tests you familiar here with that it's a strange thing uh we would do it quarterly and what we would do is we would take water from Upstream from the river and when we take our water send it off to a lab and they would test it what they do is they keep making increasing concentrations of our Wastewater into the river water and they would test for Sero daphnia which is water flea and Fathead minnows and they go until our waste water would kill 50% of them that's a fun job huh oh my God fat minnows and and the question always is in fact somebody asked me this uh in my classes last fall is what happened to when you fail I have no idea but the test is so accurate that it could take more than 100% crazy that's another thing that they test for what is your effect on the river stream so all of those and that I believe is must be that all right any questions I did get a question oh uh please excuse me specific to uh do you have any experience Jim with partic acid no I don't and I've only recently heard of that and apparently there is some work being done in that area par atic acid for disinfection uh but I I have none myself any question New Concept FKS in the room other folks on the line free to use the chat thanks forend my question um I know it's going to vary the answer this question is going to vary a lot depending on the plant but I'm just trying to grasp the concept of how long it takes from water to get from the beginning of the plant to the end is it hours minutes days not minutes 12 hours General okay goes through pretty fast and the bugs are extremely quick in what they do do treatment PL run 24 hours how to that people stop flushing at 8:00 p.m. hold up until tomorrow morning yeah that that that's one of the the challenges whatever is going badly in your plant you can't stop the water can't just going to keep on coming matter what's going on the uh yeah when you when you look at a treatment plant there in order to to facilitate that operation that no matter what happens all the lights go out every place else there's going to be generators in two locations at the plant you're going to have a generator at your head Works building because no matter what happens if you can't keep those screens clean then it's coming out the doors and windows and running all over the place and the second one's down to disinfection out of what happens to your plant you're going to disinfect that water before it goes because it's going to keep coming doesn't matter if the power's out in everybody's house because the drink of water plants in all probability is still running I don't mind that so I got I got water for nothing else that water keeps coming they got to disinfect it even if it goes out so that's a regulation that's in the books that they have to have other than that you just run around like crazy trying to straighten it out so those are the only contingency plans just in terms of any kind of fail just basically keeping things running look at any other kind of alternative system you know because you can't shut down well when you say like if things are going badly um there's got to be some measures that you can take while things are going badly you know you have you have multiple units it's not just one pump running everything you have other ones you can switch to and you do what you got to do to get five again for the most part once you're bring that water up to ground level It generally tends to run on gravity the water side of things anyway never one of the reasons that we need to keep you know the II down to a minimum is because again we we're talking about big tanks full of bugs that if your flow is too high that goes and that's one of the things that is a common operation if you get you know that 3 Ines of rain in an afternoon type of a de it's amazing how that flow changes up when you consider the area that you're covering uh you can just kill your irration let your bugs go sit on the floor and let the water just pass on through as long as you're disinfecting at the end you can actually bypass under certain conditions and bypass is a is a naughty word in this business but under certain conditions you got to save your plant you know if all your bugs are on the way to Naran and Bay then what are you going to do tomorrow so certain things like that but it could be a challenge sometimes my particular operation was strange in that you know I didn't have multiple I had one clarifier and when that broke down once we all went into a panic because we know what the heck we going to do so it varies from plant to plant what happens when maybe somebody discharges something that kills all the bugs or something like that how do they replenish that supply of bacteria again you like the situation up in Plymouth and and some other you have multiple trains okay so depending on uh how bad it is maybe you just wiped out one train and you can bring the other one back online worst comes the worst you bring in sludge from somebody down the road and Reed the whole system it's still you're going to be in violation probably for a week or so before you get things back to normal that's all you can do and that's why it's very critical to have that pre-treatment operation doing what it's doing and that's the thing generally things don't happen that quick you know somebody nukes your plant like that you know they just dumped a whole ton of cadmium into you nothing you can do most things change very slowly and that's where process monitoring the process control is really important like the microscope exams I guess we're going to be doing it again for the commission we'll have the little bugs out there uh to me that's a very critical thing because these systems change very slowly again you're relying on five-day data like bod's 5 days old so you got to Monitor and see what's going on it's very crucial I I'll be honest I've not run a municipal plant but to me got to seem kind of boring to some degree again my place was just all over the place because it was an industrial situation with different things these things are very consistent what their influence is like it doesn't change a whole lot unless somebody messes up at whatever but would you you know the demand try to keep uh on the chlorine demand yeah you you set up with you kind of know how things go again things at that end shouldn't be very in a whole heck of a lot and you're going to know anyways you're going to take a look at your clarifiers you're going to take a look at your reflu turb is all get up so you know you're going to be losing a lot of stuff and moving it up uh thing that when we talk about the nutrient removal on the last day that's one of the places where plants kind of get caught with their pants down because if you don't want to nitrify if you don't have to do nutrient removal you kind of slip into it by accident your chlorine demand is going to go crazy you're going to get caught by the aall I actually got a call from L drinking water one day they wanted to know what the heck we were doing because he was using chlorine like it was going out of St it was accusing us of dumping excess of ammonia into the river and I tell you the amount of ammonia we were allowed to put in in those days compared to what you can do now astronomical uh we had nothing wrong he apparently had a lot of them compound coming in from someplace and it just eats up that chlorine like crazy and again when they're trying to go for a free chlorine residual unlike us thisal plant that that's just knocking it socks off like that I have a question about um I know it's like a a topic that new piic is exploring and maybe training on in the future but um for for plants like Deer Island or maybe um anything on argant Bay or anything Coastal and coastally influence um maybe if you could just speak briefly to like what what planners and construction folks are looking at with resiliency to Coastal storms uh it's a big topic classes this spring uh well I I'm really not totally in tune with that whole thing but I the one reference point I have I think they're looking at the 100e flood plus 5 ft now which you know is all well and good if you're got to build a new plant but nobody's building a new plant and how do you do deal with the old plant you can't just Jack the whole thing up 10 feet try to get it across but there are things that can be done and that's what we're addressing this spring in our training we've got uh three training courses scheduled one of Portsmouth if I Portsmouth New Bedford and somewhere in RH Connecticut I think to address those issues he has a lot of be planning and and how you going to deal with it inter all right be good well thanks for calling in folks thanks everyone in the room for joining um friendly reminder we have another unit next week uh it'll be Wednesday of next week same time different call in number you should have that login information and then we're going to skip a week and February 1st will be the third and final unit with its uh unique Callin and log in well thanks again everyone have a great day thank [Applause] you