Wastewater Treatment Plant Virtual Tour

[Music] [Applause] [Music] hi i'm ryan gifford wastewater superintendent for the city of wisconsin rapids wastewater department and today we're going to take you through a virtual tour of our facility some of the different unique processes we have here go through our laboratory and get a shot of some of our equipment and different things this is kind of an informational video for the public and different people interested in our facility so i guess what i'll start with is a little knowledge about how the wastewater gets to this facility um so throughout the city each home discharges its sewage into a collection of underground pipes that flow mostly under the road and end up at this facility via different lift stations so a lift station takes the sewage as after it flows by gravity pumps it up and allows us flow by gravity again so that building right over there is our headworks building where it's the top point of this treatment facility so all of our lift stations are pumping to that point the wastewater is flowing through different processes one of them is a bar screen where it's removing rags and inorganic material and it goes through a grit chamber where it's removing and it settles that's heavy like sand or rocks or things like that after it goes through those headworks treatment processes it ends up at this primary clarifier and really all we're doing in the primary clarifier here is allowing the water some resonance time or a chance to kind of slow its velocity and settle so any water that gets this tank is going to spend two to five hours in this tank anything heavy enough to settle to the bottom by gravity we pumped out to our digestion process and then the clear water up at the top which is what you see flowing over the weirs there is your primary clarified effluent water which goes on to the next portion of the treatment process so really you're letting the water get in the tank you can see out in the middle there how the water is flowing into the tank in that stilling well and you're just allowing a chance of gravity to pull out the heavy solids and you're removing about 30 percent of your tss which is total suspended solids and your bod which is that strength of wastewater carbon that derek talked about in the laboratory so pretty rudimentary type treatment system in the primary clarifier but an important step to reduce those volatile organic solids and reduce a portion of your soluble bod just to lighten the load on the rest of your treatment works downstream we have two primary clarifiers here in wisconsin rapids we only require to run one at a time so we are able to take turns usually once a year we'll switch them just to keep the equipment fresh we can do repairs we can do different maintenance on them so we always have that redundancy in the event of a failure so that's the primary clarifier if you look here this skimmer arm continues to go around it makes about two revolutions per hour every day of the year and all it's doing is just skimming that floating solids off and then over there there's what's called the scum beach and that's collecting the solids that's floating pumping them off to the digestion process so this is the next stage of the treatment process here in wisconsin rapids and this is what's called an mbbr or a moving bed biofilm reactor and what's happening in here is we're taking that primary effluent that we just sent through the primary clarifier which has got a lot of soluble bods so a lot of soluble carbon some nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus we're putting that into these reactors these mbbr reactors we're adding dissolved oxygen to them and now the bacteria the microorganisms are consuming that body that nitrogen that phosphorus into their cell bodies as food by use of air for respiration and they're treating the wastewater essentially so if you look kind of in this tank you can see that there are there's a brown color to it and part of what that is is the actual wastewater in there and the other part of it is what we call mixed slicker or those microorganisms so they're they're microscopic organisms living in there consuming air consuming nitrogen phosphorus body and really all we're doing is monitoring the amount of dissolved oxygen they have because they require a minimum amount of do to continue to function properly so we have aeration basin probes that are measuring online real-time do there's blowers in the building over here so they're ramping the blowers up and down based on the amount of dissolved oxygen needed to complete our treatment process so when things in town you know we have some industrial customers like ocean spray mariani we have a landfill in town when they're sending us a higher strength waste water our what we call bugs or our microbes are going to require more oxygen to treat that so our do is going to drop our blower is going to go up so it's going to put more air in the tank at night when everyone's sleeping and there's less wastewater less strong wastewater the do's going to go up the blowers are going to go down so we're always trying to achieve the optimum amount of deal in this tank so we're not wasting energy we're not wasting air um not wasting electricity so we're just trying to be very efficient because this is the heart of our treatment process right here this is where 99 of the bod is removed from the facility and as you look you can kind of see it's kind of hard to tell but there's little discs in there little wafers and what those are are that moving bed biofilm process in most facilities that are activated sludge so activated sludge is that free swimming suspended growth that bacteria i'm talking about they're in there but there's also this media in there which allows bacteria that grab onto it called fix film and now they live on all those discs so we have two things happening here we have suspended growth activated sludge during the treatment we also have attached growth fixed film bacteria doing the treatment and the reason we have that fixed film integrated with the activated sludge is it's just a higher rate reactor it has the ability to remove more body and a smaller footprint so a typical tank this size with just activated sludge you're going to be able to remove probably 5000 pounds of beauty per day this can do about 10 so you're you're doubling your treatment capacity by adding that moving bed biofilm aspect to it there's different things that you uh you learn to look for as an operator of a facility like this um you know obviously you're measuring that online do you know how much oxygen you have in there but you're also looking at things like the foam that's on the basin is the foam real white in color that signifies something is it real dark in color is it black in color how much foam is there you know there's a lot of what's the smell like there's a lot of things that you learn by operating these facilities that are just kind of second nature that if you looked at the tank you could tell okay we have under loaded conditions we have white foam so it's there's a lot of feel it's almost kind of an art learning how to run one of these reactors all right so this is the next step in our secondary treatment process um and what what's happening here is it's similar what we just saw in the mbbr but this doesn't have that fixed film moving bed um attached growth process this is just suspended growth activated sludge in these basins and all they're doing is you know i told you we did probably 99 percent of our body removal in the mbbr if the load is really heavy or for some reason body starts slipping through that initial treatment process of the mbbr we have these tanks down here to finish up any more treatment that needs to happen so you're getting more stabilization of the of the waste water with this extended aeration stage this facility we do have an ammonia permit a nitrogen permit so you need longer cell retention times to fully nitrify to use up nitrogen as ammonia so this stage really allows us to make sure we're removing 99 of the ammonia 99 of body and 90 plus percent of the phosphorus so it's just another way and we have the ability here there's four chambers four aeration basins we have three on it this time we could go down to two if we didn't need all the treatment capacity we could onto one a lot of flexibility down here just to make sure we're achieving all of the treatment needs that we have so the water comes in at the front of the basins down there it works its way just by hydraulic pressure from the influent flow through this basin it exits here over the weirs and depending on flow it's probably spending um three four five hours in these reactor basins just to finish up that treatment process remove the nitrogen remove the phosphorus remove the body mean from this point it's going to flow over the weirs and it's going to go to the splitter boxes and it's going to go to one of our two final clarifiers where we remove the microbes that we just used to do the treatment after the water leaves aeration basins we're able to split it between two final clarifiers by use of these gates so right now we have half of the excuse me half of the flow going to our larger final clarifier the one to the north and then the other half is over here which is going to the southern final clarifier and you can see that if we were to have a hydraulic incident where the flow went too high we could start opening these gates to allow more water to move through the facility this is the next stage in the treatment process this is really the last stage before disinfection which then goes on to the wisconsin river but this is our final clarifier we have two of them this being the larger of one 125 foot diameter 1.3 million gallons what we're achieving here is we're taking that activated sludge treatment process which was the microbes using air to treat the wastewater now we're just allowing gravity to settle them out to the bottom and the clear water that stays up near the top flows over the weirs and onto the next treatment process so again this is kind of like the primary clarifier but instead of settling out raw influence wastewater we're now taking what we feel is the treated wastewater settling the microbes out of them sending them onto the digestion process and taking the clear water sending it over out to the disinfection process and onto the wisconsin river so nothing real magical happening just water entering the middle you can see there's a brown color to it that's the microbes they're settling to the bottom just like the primary clarifier anything that floats in the top is being collected by that arm right there which is about to go over the beach and uh you know we're removing 99 of the microbes in our water so what this is is it's a sludge judge which is just kind of a rough way um that we measure how much blanket is on the bottom and when i say blanket i mean we're trying to settle out microorganisms to the bottom so there's going to be a blanket of them laying on the bottom and we're going to suck that out with our pumps and if you kind of want to have an idea a quick snapshot of how much is in the tank we have these clear tubes and this tank is about 12 feet deep so you got to have a pretty long tube and you're literally just kind of sticking it in there and it's going to give you a profile of what it looks like if you could see the side depth you can see it's nice clear water up top and it stays pretty clear until you're getting near that bottom where you see probably one two two feet of that darker what we call flock so that's the microorganisms that you're trying to settle out send some of them back to the treatment process to do it again and waste some of them into the digesters to be treated with the solids so that gives you kind of a a profile of what the uh of what the tank looks like underneath and we have these for secondary clarifiers so we kind of know what's happening the secondary clarifiers we have them for primary clarifiers so that you can tell what sort of a primary blanket you have because you don't want to let your blanket get too too thick otherwise you're into pumpability problems you can run into septicity problems older problems it's really it's just another control mechanism for us around the facility the last stage of treatment we do before we send it onto the wisconsin river is housed in that building there and it's not disinfection season right now so there's not going to be anything to see but between the months of may 1st and october 31st we have a ultraviolet disinfection system which is a bunch of uv bulbs in big racks that we set down into the channel so the water is routed through a channel and in that channel is about 190 different ultraviolet disinfection bulbs that are disinfecting anything remaining in the water so if some of the bacteria get through the final clarifier or there's some contaminants they're going to use ultraviolet light to kill and disinfect the water and then it's going to go on the wisconsin river where it'll be safe for boaters fishermen swimmers you know any any recreation that happens in the river during those months between may and october we have the disinfection running so that we're protecting them from the small amount of bacteria that we might be pushing through the facility in the event of an upset so basically those four stainless steel cabinets that you see and then the control panels over there are the uv disinfection system and underneath the grates in those channels would be where the bulbs are sitting in the water so we're controlling them from all those different points where they're connected to the actual control modules and they're ramping the light up or down based on the transmittance in the water so if it's nice good clean clear water the uv system is going to ramp way down if we're having a little bit of issue or having some turbidity in our effluent it's going to ramp the uv system up and we're going to get a better kill on the bacteria that might be moving through the system so yeah the water is moving through these channels and if you look right here you can see that we have weighted gates that are modulating to keep the level in the channel where they're supposed to be to make sure all the bulbs are staying submerged and that's all based on hydraulic pressure we just got done talking about the whole liquid treatment process which was that influence wastewater its primary steps its secondary steps the disinfection steps and then it going to the river and the whole time we were talking about solids that settle have to be pumped to the digesters and that's what we're talking about here is we have three different digesters all anaerobic two of them are thermophilic digesters which means they're heated to 131 degrees fahrenheit this larger last step is like a secondary digester and that's a mesophilic so that's only heated to about 98 degrees fahrenheit and what you're doing in these digesters is you're pumping in those solids we talked about those volatile organic solids you're creating an anaerobic condition you're heating it and you're mixing it and that's it's no more complicated than that and in that anaerobic heat of condition you have anaerobic bacteria that starts to grow and they're consuming the volatile organics they're reducing the volatile solids in these tanks by 40 50 60 percent so you're actually getting up to 60 percent 70 percent just reduction in overall material from going anaerobic and heating so it's pretty amazing that you can put things in a tank take away oxygen and heat them and you can lose 70 percent of volatile organic content so that's neat and what happens is as a byproduct of the anaerobic digestion process they make hydrogen sulfide they make water or they release water and they make methane and that methane is stored in these covers so you can see how they're kind of up off of the tanks that's because they're literally floating on methane gas and that methane gas is then collected and we burn it in a biogas generator to make our own power throughout the facility to help supplement heating of the digesters we also have some boilers that are fired by the methane to heat the digestion so it is a fairly self-sufficient process we still do buy some natural gas to heat them we still do buy some power from the utility but we're able to really supplement our own resource costs by way of using that methane so it's kind of a neat process we go through after after we digest in our thermophilic digesters we go to the meso and then we de-water it into a cake solid and that cake is then land applied as a fertilizer and we're actually a class a facility here one of the few in wisconsin that i know about right now and we achieved that by way of the t-pad process so that thermophilic process that heats to 131 the dnr says that's sufficient in making a class a product now that product being class a can go anywhere you want it there's there's not a lot of restrictions you can use it in your yards your gardens farm fields you could dry and bag it potentially we typically are trying to give it away or sell it to farmers for agricultural uses really kind of a neat process that we'll we'll get into a little bit here so these are the ultraviolet disinfection banks and bulbs i was talking about just before for disinfection disinfection season runs between may 1 and october 31 so right now it's not disinfection season so we have them in their racks and we're doing maintenance on them we're replacing burnt out bulbs replacing seals fixing sleeves you know there's a lot of maintenance that goes into this system but it does a really good job very robust system there's 26 banks we have here 196 different individual bulbs each bulb is about 300 plus you have electric components quartz sleeves seals it's it's a it's a costly system but it's a robust system that does a phenomenal job of disinfecting you know upwards of five six million gallons of wastewater per day that t-pad digestion process i was talking about where you're anaerobically digesting the solids in your facility after the digestion process is complete we have this fan press several different fan presses and what you're doing here is you're pumping the digestive solids through the press you're adding a flocculant to it to help it flock together and thicken up and then you're squeezing water out of it and the byproduct [Applause] i guess he doesn't have it running right now shoot but you can see the water that's coming out down there is clearer thin water that you're squeezing out and you're ending up with a thicker cake after this process is done you can put about 150 gallons a minute through this machine and we basically use it to keep the digestion process to keep the level down so that this is the control mechanism for where we're running the anaerobic digestion process if we need to make room to put more throughput through the facility we run this press harder we fill the truck take it to a drying pad so you're squeezing out the water you're thickening it you're making it into a cake we're putting in a black top pad turning it with a compost turner and now you have a much thicker almost like bio salad that we're giving away or trying to sell to farmers and local residents of wisconsin rapids so these are our two rotating drum thickeners they're both 400 gallon per minute unit so we can do a total of 800 gpm through this process really all you're trying to achieve here is you're taking that waste activated sludge i told you about adding a flocculant to it so it thickens up wants to release shed shed that clear water and it's moving through this big rotating screen drum and the water is falling out of it as it goes so you're putting in a thin pros product here with a flocculant it moves its way across the rotating drum and on the back end you have a thick five six percent solid um waste activated sludge so you're you're removing clear water so that your digestion process doesn't have to deal with as much cold clear water all right so this is our chp combined heat and power biogas driven generator it's a 330 kw unit so we can produce 330 kw kilowatt hours per hour with this unit and like i was talking about with the anaerobic digestion process that has a byproduct of methane and h2s we're capturing that methane in those covers where it's stored creating pressure now as we ramp this generator up and down that's going to determine how much gas we're pulling out of those covers on the anaerobic digesters and we're constantly trying to match the gas production to the kilowatt hour production with this unit and when we're running well we have a lot of methane we have plenty of high strength waste coming through if we can run this wide open we can be 70 80 sometimes 90 percent we've had a few times of 100 self-sufficiency from the electric utility the problem is is that you know as your digestion feedstock changes your methane production changes so there's going to be times you're going to run it lower you're going to buy more electricity but we do have the ability to make all the power we need it's just not a it's not an everyday occurrence here but you know we are i think in 2020 so far we're averaging about a 62 percent um coverage of our own electrical bills so that's a huge chunk for a facility this size our electrical bills are between 10 and 15 000 a month and now you're taking away half to 60 percent of that cost so it's a big deal for the utility and we have a control panel here that lets us do all of our self diagnostics lets us know what's happening engine temperature oil temperatures cylinder head temperatures i mean it has more information than we can even really use um but it's a it's a great tool for us to understand what's happening one of the one of the issues with burning biogas or methane is that it is it can be dirty or it's dirtier than natural gas or diesel fuel so we're dealing with cylinder buildup you get what's called siloxane buildups on your cylinders and your cylinder heads so we're always watching those temperatures to know when we need to pull those apart clean them change the spark plugs there is a lot of maintenance that goes into this into this chp type process but you can see right now we're running at 300 kw so we're almost at full speed um and when we get back into the into the control room i can show you it'll actually give you a kilowatt being purchased from the utility and kilowatt being produced and right now we're probably producing the majority of our own right now so pretty cool this this one here is a gas-fired natural or methane fired boiler and this one here is just a heat exchanger it can be used interchangeably the reason we prefer to use the heat exchanger is because that chp we just looked at the loop that goes through the block of that engine and through the exhaust of that engine is piped over here and actually keeps this at 180 degrees all the time so instead of having to burn a bunch of natural gas or use our methane in this boiler we can use that chp which is making heat already making power also to heat up our digesters so the sludge the digesters are on either side of us right now the sludge is pumped through these tubes and there's that hot water jacket inside of here it's heating that sludge up to that 13132 degrees and just trying to maintain that temp at all times the feed sludge we have so that primary settled solid i talked about that waste activated solid the high strength waste we take which like the grease traps from town food grade waste that's also pumped through this heat exchanger to pre-warm it we have the ability to do that or not do that but if we can pre-warm some of that cold feed that also helps not have such an energy demand on that drop in temperature but you can see there's quite a bit of quite a bit of components here i don't know if you'll get a shot of these three-way actuators because this is that class a t-pad batch process i talked about a little bit you have to isolate each digester every single day so you have to feed one and hold it feed one and hold it back and forth so you have these large actuators that are turning every single day to switch which digest is being held switch which digest is being fed so there's quite a few components a lot of equipment that we're maintaining here to make this class a t-pad work this down here is what we call like the pipe gallery i guess you might say so all of the processes on the solids end of things i was just talking about have at least two or three mixing pumps two or three feed pumps um the the rdts have three feed pumps as well you know there's just for every single component and process we talked about you've got piping you've got check valves you've got plug valves you have motors pumps seals solenoids so there's just a ton of components and equipment and maintenance that has to go into every single thing that we're doing and you kind of get a little idea of how much so the only thing we're looking at here is rdt feed pumps and fournier fan press mixing and feed pumps so just those two process alone you're talking about all this equipment that we have to maintain so there is a lot that goes into it and um it's uh it's part of the reason that we have two full-time mechanics three full-time operators a chief operator seasonal help um treating 5.5 3.5 to 5.5 million gallons of wastewater a day requires a lot of energy and a lot of equipment all of the stainless piping you see down here is all the biogas being collected whether it's being produced stored or sent to its ultimate use being the chp or the boiler it's going through different drip traps because like i said when these anaerobic bacteria make hydrogen sulfide methane and they also release water you have to get that water out of your gas before you can use it so these drip traps are allowing the gas to come to a point where it spends a little more time the water wants to settle out to the bottom you can see it's releasing water all the time so there is a fairly significant amount of water that has to be removed [Music] some facilities are going to also send that biogas through a treatment process before they burn it in their chp whether it be h2s removal media or siloxane removal media we don't have to really do that we remove moisture and we burn in the engine another thing we did here recently and we did this all in-house was we were having a significant issue with our heat exchanger that heats our digesters fouling with what's called vivianite which is a hard precipitant that comes out of the sludge when the temperature swings and it's a combination of several nutrients i think it's magnesium iron um there's like four or five different nutrients that combine to create this precipitant and it was severely diminishing our heat transfer across our heat exchanger so we thought about doing was we took some of this piping all the painted piping of what was original with the upgrade and we built some of this new stainless piping to bypass the heat exchanger with the feed so you're taking that real cold temperature feed which was causing a big swing in temperature and removing it from the heat exchanger and it's been pretty successful but we had to install you know we had to core through the wall install all new stainless piping install a new three-way actuator and then all the stainless pipe that you see in here we kind of designed and did in-house with the help of a mechanical contractor to sort of manipulate the t-pad process in a way it wasn't really designed to be but it has proven to be pretty successful with minimizing that vivianite following on our tubes it's kind of a neat a neat in-house initiative that we came up with that's been pretty successful okay so what's happening in here is um when i was talking about the anaerobic digestion process where you're taking the volatile solids putting them in an anaerobic tank heating it and mixing it that's all that's happening this is how we mix it in rapids so we're taking that methane gas that's being produced sucking it out of the top bringing it into these gas compressor compressors sending it back into the tank and it what's called a cannon it's a huge barrel in the middle with all these different holes in it and you're just letting that compressed methane make big long bubbles and tumble and it just mixes the tank so we're using the gas the gas to be produced we're using it to burn we're using it to fuel our boilers and we're also using it to mix the tanks so it's a pretty sustainable way of doing it some tanks have mechanical mixers where there's things moving some have extra pumps with nozzles whether they're pumping we're using gas to try to turn over our digesters um and you can see there's quite a bit going on here you have to remove the moisture again so you have these moisture removal vessels you gotta measure all your pressures on your discharge side for the cannon so there's another fair amount of things to be monitoring maintaining and uh and working on so it's a good technology it works well um just quite a bit quite a bit of components to it again i have mccs we have in the facility and what's happening in here is you're basically just getting an electrical point where you have access to all of your equipment its fuses its control mechanisms some indicators of whether it's running whether it has faults you can lock it out if you have to work on it any of the control type electrical things are routed through these mccs so that we have the ability to isolate the equipment work on the electrical components all in a central location and we also have control panels here with touch screens that allow you to look at the whole facility from one point and make make adjustments on the fly so what this tank is here is when we were talking about the microorganisms that we're trying to settle out of the process and the final clarifiers i had said that the majority is returned back to the process to continue to treat some is what we call wasted out it turns into a waste activated sludge to be thickened in that drum thickener we talked about and then sent to the digester so it's just our way of controlling how many microorganisms we have in the facility to do the treatment putting them through the digestion process and now they become part of our bile salad so here's where we're holding them it's aerated to keep the odors down to keep it suspended keep it fresh so that it can be thickened properly in the rdt so the last thing that we haven't really talked about yet we talked about the laboratory we talked about the process liquid and solid talked about some outside defense things the last thing i want to touch on was are what's called supervisory control and data acquisition system or scada system and that's basically this group of computers here that gives us the ability to control basically the entire facility and we do have the ability to do it from home as well so we can log into the system from home check what's going on make adjustments it lets us staff this facility with considerably less manpower than would otherwise be necessary um you know so we have processed logic controllers on virtually every piece of process equipment so the primary clarifiers we talked about you know you can go to that piece of equipment click on it it shows you all the equipment that's necessary for it you know that spinning arm we talked about that's this drive right here so you can see it's lit up green so we know it's running the scum pumps that pump off the floating solids the pumps off the bottom that we talked about which is your primary sludge pumps which are here so as you click on every component it's going to take you to the page and let's let you monitor what's happening how often it's pumping when it's pumping you know is there an issue with it are there alarms so it really just gives us the ability to operate the plant you know with minimal minimal staffing [Music] let's see if we go to the overview you can see here's our three thermophilic digesters that we talked about this is actually the volume of gas in them right now so if you look at the sequencing page we've got 40 000 cubic feet of gas right now being stored in those three covers and that's the maximum is 50 000 so we're we're approaching the maximum amount stored so we're probably going to bump the speed of that generator up a little bit more and make a little more power and a little bit more heat if we go to the overview for the collection system you know we get an idea of what every single lift station is doing in the city just from these two pages shows you the wet well level where the pumps are going to start and stop shows you individual lift stations so you can see here dewey street lift station number one is currently running at 56 percent so even the 17 lift stations that are throughout the city we can sit right here and tell exactly what's going on byron is a municipal customer of ours we can monitor what they're doing right now beer and sending us 161 gallons per minute via one of their monitoring stations the other they're not using currently so it's really kind of neat just a lot of a lot of information here this kind of shows just a quick snapshot of all the lift stations throughout the facility see we're here at the master and we're talking to each one of these remote stations we can even tell trends this is showing the lift station wet well levels you can see as the pumps fire pumps it down slowly builds up pumps fire pumps it down so come in here in the morning and have a pretty good idea of what's happening throughout the facility in about 10 minutes as the water is leaving the house it's going to flow through that network of underground pipes by gravity and then the lift stations so say you live on the west side of town over near gainer it's going to leave your house it's going to run down gainer and it's going to hit west side pumping station westside pumping station now as the level goes up or down you're gonna have pumps that run faster or slower you'd have up to four pumps running at once they're gonna pump it right here to the wastewater treatment plant um other smaller plants like oops i'm getting cloud here am i going to pump like say washington that's going to pump all the way over to dewey you know there's little lift stations that are going to contribute to the larger lift stations the four stations that actually come right here to the plant our west side dewey pepper and two miles so those are our four largest stations and they're all lifting water to the wastewater treatment plant so i think that's probably about it for um what i will need to go through from the scada but uh just kind of another efficiency that we're trying to take advantage of to do the best job that we can my name is derek and i'm the chief operator at the wastewater treatment plant this is the laboratory we're going to go through some of the tests we do here at the facility daily the first thing we have here is some samples of the influent water coming in you can see there's a lot of solids in it this is in between our processes after it settles out so this is the primary effluent and this is actually our final product that goes out to the wisconsin river you can see that there it is a lot more clear there's a lot less tss in it and overall it has less carbon less nutrients and a lot less pathogens in it here is kind of mocking our final clarifier before the final clarifiers this would be an aeration basin where it'd be all mixed up right here is a level of mixed liquor suspended solids that's basically what's doing most of the work at the facility it's the secondary process when we have to get rid of our solids we waste them out and eventually they end up in our digesters which is this right here so this is digested sludge that's what that looks like it's very warm so we're going to go into some of the testing our main test that we do seven days a week is our biochemical oxygen demand test we monitor that right here basically we are taking a do probe measuring dissolved oxygen in versus five days later dissolve oxygen out we do some calculations and we can basically compare the use the demand of dissolved oxygen is comparable to the amount of carbon in your water another test we do seven days a week is ph testing we do that on our final effluent every single day we gotta make sure that our ph is neutral so our fecal permit runs from may to october end of october this is a fecal bath so what we do is we run membrane filters on an auger all that stuff is kind of in the refrigerator so you can't see it but it sits in an incubator for 24 hours and then we read out the auger plates and the colonies a test that we do five days a week is total suspended solids that's basically everything that's organic and inorganic is suspended in in the water and we need to make sure that that is getting out of the facility um it basically carries it has a lot of nutrients in it it has a lot of phosphorus it has a lot of carbon and there's things that we don't want to go to the river and our permit doesn't allow a certain amount of nutrients and biochemical oxygen man to exit the facility and go into the river one of the main tests we do is a total phosphorus test we have to run phosphorus five days a week we do it all in one batch because we're able to save samples it's a more extensive test our permit on that is one milligram per liter we usually try to keep it around 0.5 though that's a test that involves digestion and acid digestion and we read them out on a spectrophotometer so not only do we do permit testing here but we do a lot of process control testing this lab is where we find out like how well the plant is running this is where we make our changes based off of our numbers in here it's basically kind of the heart of the facility over here we have different graphs that show basically our quality control um there's many things that we have to do in here to make sure that this lab is running properly per the dnr we have to do calibration checks we have to do lod checks every quarter and this is kind of where we just keep track of all that we have graphs of where we should be and you can see that we're hitting our marks very well just verification charts everything that the dnr requires us to keep our permit and maintain it and when they do a lab audit they would go through all of these things so what we just kind of went through was the whole in the fence treatment process at this facility we went through liquid training treatment we went through solids treatment with our anaerobic edition process we covered a lot of topics what we didn't really talk much about was the outside defense things so all the homes throughout the city wisconsin rapids have their lateral connection pipe connected to our sewer main under the road typically and that water flows to the facility like we talked about to lift stations um what we didn't talk about though was all the maintenance that goes into that you know we have these two vac trucks here that are constantly cleaning those pipes jetting them out cutting roots out of them if they're getting old um cleaning the catch basins for the storm water utility televising all the sanitarian storm to make sure we know what condition our pipes are in where we need to be focusing our design and replacement efforts so there's a whole other department within the wastewater department called the collection system department where we have two employees that are doing what i said televising root cutting operating these trucks assisting the street department so it's it's a whole nother ballgame when you get outside of the fence and there's there's such important maintenance that happens there because if our sewer mains don't flow properly you start backing things up which backs up homes a lot of mad residents so the job that these guys do here is is just as important as what we do in the treatment facility um and and with with that you know sometimes we get into challenges with things that get flushed down the toilet or put down a drain that shouldn't be there things like you know those clorox wipes a lot of them say flushable on them in our eyes they're not flushable they do not belong in our system you know the only thing we want to see is that organic human waste and toilet paper anything else is going to cause us issues and as a resident of the city you'd want to be worried about things that cause us extra work because they're going to cost more money which is going to potentially affect rates so it's it's important for homeowners to understand that the better they treat their plumbing the better it treats our system the easy it is for us the cheaper it is for us those extra things like pulling pumps that are plugged with rags or unclogging sewer mains under the street that are plugged up um you know it just costs more money more time it's not good for the environment so it's important for for everyone to just recognize how important it is to to be responsible with how you use your sewer lateral and your sewer system in front of your house and your your internal plumbing your house as well you know it's just important for that so um just another another thing we do here at the wastewater department that we find to be very important and we try to do the best job we can um we have these two vac trucks we should probably get a shot of the lift station or the televising unit as well okay so this is um our actual televising rig which was recently replaced in the last three years and it's really a pretty neat setup so like we were talking about with all those seweragery main sanitary main lines and things like that we have this little camera that we can drop down into the actual sewer and then by way of remote control from the laptop or he actually has a little handheld controller he can drive it throughout the the network of pipes checking condition looking for issues cracks roots offset joints just simply checking what's the composition of the material if we don't know if we haven't been in this part of town it's older what do we have under the ground is it clay pipe is it old galvanized you know just assessing the condition of our system is extremely important as well or if we have issues and we're not sure what the issue is you can drop this guy down there and visually see what's happening another thing it's useful for is where all these lateral lines are connecting to the main line of the road you can drive up to the camera and you can turn and look into it see is the connection point to the main is there issues there is it broken is there roots so um just a really another crucial piece of equipment that we take advantage of really on a daily basis uh here at the wastewater utility yeah another one of the issues so we talked a little bit about the the flushing of inappropriate things the clorox wipes and and the issues it creates for us another big issue that i think a lot of people don't know about is uh what's called inflow and infiltration so that's clear water entering the sanitary sewer system you know in the sanitary sewer system you don't want rain water you don't want clear tap water if you can avoid it i'm entering the system it just causes us to have to treat more gallons pump more gallons the costs go up for us when things like that happen and a lot of times when we start seeing flows at the facility going up we can take our camera drive through different areas of town and try to figure out what's happening is there a crack in the main line so there's ground water coming in uh does someone have an illegal sump pump hookup where they're pumping water out of their basement into the sanitary connection our camera can see that so that's another thing that a lot of people i think in the city maybe don't realize is that when you have a sump pump in your basement that shouldn't be connected to the sanitary system that should be connected to either the storm water system in front of your house or out into your backyard or down the curb into the storm water that's storm water that is not sanitary water so that's another issue we have when it rains an inch or two in the middle of the night or whenever we see our flows go up sometimes we have to take a camera and try to identify where is all this extra clear water coming from so it's another initiative we're trying to kind of bring to the forefront here in the utility is getting a handle on illegal sump pump hookups a handle on where i and i may be coming from replacing areas that are cracked having eye and eye you know just really trying to get a better understanding of it and it'll be much easier for us to do that with the support of the residents in rapids you know fixing those illegal sump pump hookups if they have them so a couple things you're looking at in here ben and jesse are two collections guys they have computers so we work real closely with the engineering department in the city and the gis specialist so all the things that we televise can be uploaded to their software and that way the gis specialist can create maps that show okay if we want to know in the city where's our worst route areas to be focusing on he can take all that footage create a map boom now we know the main areas we should be cutting for roots he can do that with catch basins i mean uploading our data and giving it to engineering and gis just makes it more valuable information for people to have for design purposes replacement purposes you know it's just another efficiency that we're trying to take advantage of this other thing here is an actual push camera and what that's able to do is if you're going to go into a home or a smaller line where you're not going to put the motorized camera you can put that in there and you just push it and it'll pan itself out and you can record it on there as well so we have smaller components for residential lines just another another flexibility that we have so along with all the maintenance we were talking about around the facility i told you if we have two full-time mechanics on staff the other thing that our mechanic takes care of is maintenance at the lift station so you have the collections guys taking care of the underground pipe networks helping clean lift stations but now this is our maintenance truck and he actually has this motorized crane so he can pull submersible pumps throughout the city most of our lift stations and the way we're designing them moving forward are large cement structure wet wells with submersible pumps we feel it's probably the most efficient and the safest way to do it instead of doing confined space entries working underground we just send the pump down submersibly it pumps we don't worry about it when it has a problem we have our crane we can pull it out bring it back to the shop work on it replace seals replace impellers do different type of maintenance activities but another another task of our maintenance mechanic is also outside the fence lift station maintenance and that's we have 17 lift stations throughout the city so it's not a small task to be monitoring and maintaining them we're tracking things like daily electrical usage daily water usage daily natural gas usage so that we know when things are changing we know if you know we can even usually tell if if someone in a part of town on a smaller lift station has a leaking toilet because we see our flows going up we say okay somebody's using more water than they should we should probably call the water department or we should just try to try to figure out where we're getting extra water from so we have it dialed in pretty closely we were fortunate in 2019 to be awarded the central states water environment association operations award it's a fairly prestigious award you know it's it's one one winner in the midwest each year goes gets this award and it's basically it's weighted by how your operations are have you been making operational improvements um you know they look at several different components um and since 2017 when i started here you know we've we've experienced some issues with settle ability we've experienced some issues with slug loading from our industrial customers so we we had some things that needed to be addressed and within the first couple of years you know the staff here has done a phenomenal job we've been able to identify some of our issues with phosphorus deficiencies and slime bulking and all those all those things we're able to identify and then solve has led to greatly improved overall treatment process here single digit parameters in our effluent for tss bod nutrients so um the facility's running extremely well and i'm extremely proud of the staff for what they've been able to accomplish here and it's it speaks volumes to receiving this award um because of what we're able to do and i just couldn't be more grateful to receive it and um you know just the staff deserves just deserves a ton of the credit for this and couldn't be happier about it so another uh some other recognition that we received recently was the 2020 laboratory excellence award that was awarded to derrick budsberg who's our chief operator and laboratory manager and i myself and joe terry uh nominated him for for that award based on his outstanding performance mostly you know since taking over the facility in 2017 there were a lot of things that derek and i knew we needed to address and chief among them initially was getting the laboratory in better compliance updating some methodology rewriting some sops training lab staff all these different things it was a daunting task and derek took them on single-handedly and has done a phenomenal job and we currently have our laboratory putting out some excellent analytical data just extremely accurate and reliable and derek took on the task of rewriting our laboratory management manual which is a huge task and he did it you know right away within a few months of starting derek made some suggestions to us about some of the additional sampling we could do to help try to get a better handle on our nutrient balance balance throughout the facility just a lot of really great ideas and some excellent work in the laboratory led to dick receiving this award and i let him talk a little bit about it to reiterate what ryan just said some of the things that i had to do in the lab was update some of our sops we got it uh extra pieces of equipment some more equipment to help us get more accurate data in the lab one of the things about taking data is that it needs to be accurate without accurate data we can't run this plant the way it's supposed to so i implemented a lot of process control checks that we do daily to make sure that the plant is where we need it to be some of the other things i did was added different sampling different sampling points to make sure that we're taking the most accurate data possible so i'm extremely proud to announce the city of wisconsin rapids has received american public works association project of the year award in the environmental category for the force main that runs from the west side lift station to the wastewater treatment plant this is a prestigious award it's the only one offered in the entire nation we're really proud of the project and the amount of work that that went into making it happen hopefully most of the public didn't even know we did it and with many of our public works activities when we're doing our job nobody knows about it right you can take a lot of things for granted but this project is not one that uh that that should be taken for granted because the amount of work and preparations the wastewater effluent from the west side that flows to this this plant has to cross the river and it and it crossed for decades under the river from the original wastewater treatment plant it was built in the 40s when the new plant was built here that old plant was converted into a lift station that's our west side lift station a new force main was laid across the the river bottom and works its way over to here over time that that pipe material is deteriorated and the city spent several years in the process of designing and planning a new west side lift station project and a force main project we were going to do that in phases but there were some telltale signs that that force main was uh close to failing just some of our our maintenance checks cathartic protection that's there to prevent corrosion we were losing continuity there which is an indication that that there's some faults in that system and so we ended up moving the project up instead of laying a new main across the bottom of the river we ended up selecting a method of horizontal directional boring and so this main is bored through rock all the way across the river and in doing so really ensures an environmental friendly solution the potential for a spill or a failure is dramatically reduced but but part of the reason the city won this award was the coordination required the cooperation between the consulting engineer strand associates the the construction company the general contractor a1 construction and the city wisconsin rapid staff is what really made this project uh move forward extremely smoothly there's just a lot of cooperation and costs were kept down because of it and and the project was done on time and and on budget when the physical connection was made from the old force main to the new force main we had to shut down that lift station and i i can't be prouder of of our staff here at the city who worked with our industrial customers so that they were aware and and could slow down their production as much as possible during that outage they went and pumped down all the lift stations and time that so that when we actually shut down and we're starting to have to fill tanker trucks and haul that material over here to be treated while that connection took place that was minimized and the contractor uh having additional trucks on standby in the event that they were needed it was a 12-hour process and it and that process took a little longer than was expected because we had a valve that we weren't aware of that was hung up but it went flawlessly and it happened overnight when flows were low and and staff just worked long hours to make it happen at the end of the project we've got a new main and reliability for the city for the next probably 100 or so years and this is an extreme high point in a career to see our project receive a national award and to have staff here at the wastewater plant that have really done an exceptional job over the last in the last five seven years just fantastic level of discipline to take a plant that that we were struggling with and we had experts reviewing and analyzing things and and so many things unanswered and have our own staff sit down and and put their nose to the grindstone and figure everything out these awards that the city have received are are prestigious and well-deserved and really goes to show how hard our staff are working to serve the community here and and i just have great pride in them and the work that they've [Music] done so that completes our tour for for today i want to thank everybody for watching and participating and thank everyone who was involved in helping make this possible community media for wisconsin rapids the staff member here at the plant a lot goes into putting something like this together so thank you to everyone also just hope everyone that views this learned something found it interesting i think it's it's good in this field to be able to show what you do kind of give people maybe a little more appreciation or a little bit more education related to what goes into this and what goes into treating wastewater there's a lot to it and and we have a very large responsibility in protecting the environment and the river and our water sources in the states so i'm very proud of what we do here appreciate everyone's time and thank you very much [Music] you

Channel: Wisconsin Rapids Community Media

Views: 189,786

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Id: qACCUEUrfTM

Length: 58min 3sec (3483 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 29 2021

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[u/_Punko_]

<sigh>

those were the days.