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Tour of water sewage treatment plant, recycling/landfill site


shootingstar

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I didn't live far from this still functioning, yet historic water treatment plant in Toronto:  https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/02/rc-harris-water-treatment-plant-toronto/   Too bad, I didn't take time to go on public tour when I lived there.  It was a 10-min. bike ride away.

As a child, I did get a tour of sewage water treatment plant in another city. As little ones, we did walk out abit on walking railed pier over the sewage lagoon outdoors. It did smell. That's all I remembered. I was 8 yrs. old.  

then in prairie city here, I joined about 60 other employees in my dept. on a bus tour of our largest landfill and municipal recycling plant.  It was very cool and made us appreciate some of the work and what other employees had to do in the waste & recycling dept. We saw large plant composting areas...where the soil was turned outdoors. Citizens can drop by with their car/truck and help themselves for free.  We had to stay on bus, because there were dump trucks and other machinery on the site.  I know that engineers have something set up for biomass (methane gas) recycling for power.  And I know that our surveying dept., now uses a drone to measure the survey/GIS points / dimensions of large-scale landfill piles, etc.

Sometimes your city might offer such a public tour. It's an eye-opener.

 

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I spent 3 months at a water treatment facility. It called a section "the beaches" because it was a holding site for a few weeks before it went back out to the water ways.. I was luck I was a Forman, because I didn't have to do any of the cleaning like the other crews had to do. 

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9 minutes ago, KrAzY said:

I spent 3 months at a water treatment facility. It called a section "the beaches" because it was a holding site for a few weeks before it went back out to the water ways.. I was luck I was a Forman, because I didn't have to do any of the cleaning like the other crews had to do. 

We were laughing our heads off, when an employee that we knew from another Water instructure dept. complained about their tour at one of our sewage treatment plants....she said even walking into the building there was a smell.  I was a bit surprised. But anyway, the facility is undergoing a multi-year billion dollar retrofit construction project.  It is just massive and driving/ cycling by, the public wouldn't know it.  The facility has to be expanded to accommodate city/population growth.

THis same facility has parts of it damaged during an enormous river flood in 2013.  I heard some of our staff working there had try to get broken tree branches, wood pieces from entering in the facility equipment and causing damage.  It sounded dangerous to me.  

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I visited the Pontiac IL sewage treatment plant more than a few times over the years for my old job.

One year during a drought I told the guys there;  You need to tell everyone in town to flush twice.  He looked at me with a confused look.  So I told him;  We need the water in Streator.  

Their water facility emptied into the Vermilion River.  25 miles downstream Streator takes it water from the river.

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I operated a private sewage treatment facility at a camp/retreat center I was the maintenance supervisor for. Lots of testing the effluent every day. It was less than five years old when I worked there so it always tested good. The plant was overkill because the effluent went into a creek that fed into a trout stream. The effluent tested safe to drink, I took their word for it.

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11 minutes ago, Wilbur said:

I did an online tour.  It was much more palatable that way. :) 

Just the scale of operations and degree of care that is required for the employees to perform their work, etc. especially for the big cities.  We all rely heavily on clean water.

Not surprisingly security is tight at many of those facilities.  As an employee I'm treated like an outsider, if I visit certain facilities since I don't work in any of those facilities, but we're all employed by the same employer.

I had a meeting at 1 of our newest facilities several yrs. ago. Incredible. There was an underground tunnel that was 1 km. long, We have 1-2 bikes, for employees to bike between destinations.  There is also joint research projects between my employer and the local university related to water treatment/processing.  These joint research partnerships probably have been going on and off for past few decades.  

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2 hours ago, shootingstar said:

We were laughing our heads off, when an employee that we knew from another Water instructure dept. complained about their tour at one of our sewage treatment plants....she said even walking into the building there was a smell.  I was a bit surprised. But anyway, the facility is undergoing a multi-year billion dollar retrofit construction project.  It is just massive and driving/ cycling by, the public wouldn't know it.  The facility has to be expanded to accommodate city/population growth.

THis same facility has parts of it damaged during an enormous river flood in 2013.  I heard some of our staff working there had try to get broken tree branches, wood pieces from entering in the facility equipment and causing damage.  It sounded dangerous to me.  

I was at one in Alanta for their big flood in 2008. We just threw a John boat in the water and removed any obstructions they were having. 
It is a lot easier then you would think to remove the stuff. 

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42 minutes ago, KrAzY said:

I was at one in Alanta for their big flood in 2008. We just threw a John boat in the water and removed any obstructions they were having. 
It is a lot easier then you would think to remove the stuff. 

There were workers inside the treatment plant.  they had stop the machinery inside the facility and climb around, etc.

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A friend from college, a fellow chemistry major, got a job at a wastewater treatment plant in Baltimore when I was a research chemist at a Baltimore chemical production plant.

Every few months, he'd call me up and ask me if anyone in one of our plants poured waste chemicals into the sewer the night before. He didn't want to report anyone, he just wanted to know what the chemical was so he could treat it and restore his algae!  A couple times, it was our people and I'd phone him back and tell him what it was and offer treatment suggestions.

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16 minutes ago, MickinMD said:

A friend from college, a fellow chemistry major, got a job at a wastewater treatment plant in Baltimore when I was a research chemist at a Baltimore chemical production plant.

Every few months, he'd call me up and ask me if anyone in one of our plants poured waste chemicals into the sewer the night before. He didn't want to report anyone, he just wanted to know what the chemical was so he could treat it and restore his algae!  A couple times, it was our people and I'd phone him back and tell him what it was and offer treatment suggestions.

One of the concerns for municipalties….is problem of people pouring pharmaceuticals down the toilet...their medicine.

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On 3/1/2020 at 9:01 PM, shootingstar said:

One of the concerns for municipalties….is problem of people pouring pharmaceuticals down the toilet...their medicine.

I don't know if the problem still exists, but the frequency with which Richard (the wastewater plant chemist) called me shows it happened a lot with plant chemicals in the late 70's - early 80's.  Baltimore harbor, inner and outer harbors, is spectacularly cleaner now than back then.

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RCHarrisPlant19.webp

On 3/1/2020 at 11:44 AM, shootingstar said:

I didn't live far from this still functioning, yet historic water treatment plant in Toronto:  https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/02/rc-harris-water-treatment-plant-toronto/   Too bad, I didn't take time to go on public tour when I lived there.  It was a 10-min. bike ride away.

As a child, I did get a tour of sewage water treatment plant in another city. As little ones, we did walk out abit on walking railed pier over the sewage lagoon outdoors. It did smell. That's all I remembered. I was 8 yrs. old.  

then in prairie city here, I joined about 60 other employees in my dept. on a bus tour of our largest landfill and municipal recycling plant.  It was very cool and made us appreciate some of the work and what other employees had to do in the waste & recycling dept. We saw large plant composting areas...where the soil was turned outdoors. Citizens can drop by with their car/truck and help themselves for free.  We had to stay on bus, because there were dump trucks and other machinery on the site.  I know that engineers have something set up for biomass (methane gas) recycling for power.  And I know that our surveying dept., now uses a drone to measure the survey/GIS points / dimensions of large-scale landfill piles, etc.

Sometimes your city might offer such a public tour. It's an eye-opener.

 

They sure don't build utilities like that any more.

 

 

RCHarrisPlant8.webp

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Used to do maintenance on treatment plants for a summer job.  It's a shitty job but someone has to do it.

 

Actually, I didn't think it was that bad, certainly better than cleaning the hog pens or worse, the farrowing house before the catch trays and auger system.

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I did that for a while when I first went to work at P&W Aircraft.  I was assigned to the calibration lab and sent to the shit farm to rebuild the flowmeter in the input race coming in from the factory. (can you say fn new guy duty).  It was great.  We got used to the smell and no supervisor ever came to see what we were doing (or not doing).

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