Link: adn.com | life : Waste away with Anchorage treatment plant.
Oh for heaven's sake... the things poor Edward has to deal with in his job. This is downright embarrassing.
When you flush,where does it go? Follow the pipes to Anchorage's high-tech treatment plant
Story by Cinthia Ritchie / Anchorage Daily News ? Photos by Erik Hill / Anchorage Daily News
Published: September 11, 2006
Last Modified: September 11, 2006 at 03:56 AM
The John M. Asplund Wastewater Treatment
Facility spreads out across a green, green field out past the Point
Woronzof turnoff. Trees and vegetation surround the building; the
bicycle path curves past. Walking in from the parking lot, you can
glimpse watermelon berries swinging on spindly stems. You can smell
damp grass and silty air from the Inlet.
Of course, that's not all you smell. Let's
not be coy here. We're talking waste. Sewage. Or, as the linguistically
bashful say, bio solids.
Whatever you call it, it's not exactly
pretty. But it's something you do approximately eight times a day,
2,900 times a year, a quarter of a million times during your life span.
Probably, you do it without thought: You simply push down the handle
and flush the toilet. But what happens next? Where does that swirling
water and waste go?
Beneath our houses and streets and work
buildings, 800 miles of pipe weave a path through the city and out to
the Point Woronzof treatment plant. There, more than 30 million gallons
of toilet, shower and laundry wastewater shuttles through a complex
process of machines, filters and purification before being released
into Cook Inlet or burned and carted off to the landfill.
Most of us never think of this. But John Knue
does. He's a sort of wastewater wonder. As foreman of the Asplund
plant, he knows the ins and outs of operation, the statistics, the
trouble spots. He's also quick to praise the unsung heroes of the
wastewater equipment world: the clarifiers, deep enough to hold a
million gallons at a time; the sludge hopper, able to cart 50 tons of
sludge off to the landfill in case of an incinerator breakdown; the
chlorine facility, which kills bacteria and parasites in outgoing flow
so that fish may swim in peace.
He's dressed in jeans and a blue shirt with
plant lettering stitched perkily across the pocket. His large glasses
slide down his nose; his oversized belt buckle looks like something a
cowboy might wear.
"Most people don't think of us, and that's
good," he says. "We're doing our jobs. Toilets flush. Showers drain.
We're behind the scenes. We're the environmental warriors."
And today, Knue is our tour guide.
"Ready to go?" he says, rubbing his hands together.
And then we're off, eight tour-goers trooping
after him down the long hallway. The first stop is the control room,
which looks like the inside of the Starship Enterprise. Computer
monitors flash while a control board outlines plant functions in a
multitude of colors: pinks and blues and cheerful, vivid purples.
Knue spews out a mouthful of statistics --
the minimum and maximum average flow (20 million gallons during slower
winter months, 35 million gallons during summer peaks) the number of
plant workers (27), the fact that the plant runs every day, all day and
all night -- and then it's time to move on to the headworks room. He
opens a hatch door, and we peer down at the flow churning into the
plant through a massive 96-inch- diameter pipe. The water is murky and
smelly; hunks of toilet paper and food bob along the surface.
"Ninety-nine point nine percent of sewage is
liquid," Knue shouts over the racket as he leads us to the grit
channel. Here, sewage is pushed through perforated plate screens that
look like narrow dresser drawers. These catch abrasive solids that
might harm expensive equipment.
"We get a lot of toys," Knue says. "Money.
Fire extinguishers. And once a washer machine motor." He shakes his
head. "We're still trying to figure that one out."
A sharp, thick smell assaults our noses, and
some of the more delicate tour-goers pull their coats demurely over
their faces. A premature gesture: As we venture deeper into the plant,
the smell will become worse. But that's later. For now we walk outside
to meet the clarifiers.
A clarifier is a huge cement pool filled with
more than a million gallons of wastewater. It is, according to Knue,
the backbone of the treatment process. The heavier solids drop to the
bottom, while the scum, usually grease and oil, collects on top. Solids
are then shipped off to the sludge pump station, scum to the scum box
and liquids to the chlorine facility.
We stop to admire clarifier No. 6, which
looks pretty much like Nos. 3 and 4. Still, it is a sight to behold,
all of that shower and toilet and dish water swirling in smelly glory.
But it won't stink for long. The whole wastewater treatment process,
Knue informs us, takes less than six hours.
Then on to what Knue refers to as the most
dangerous area in the plant: a small, hunched building that smells like
a swimming pool and houses 30-ton containers of chlorine. Chlorine is
added in extremely small doses to purify drinking water, but the gas
can be fatal if inhaled in large quantities.
We linger for a few moments and then head to
the makeshift lab in the back to watch water quality analyst Susan Lang
perform a chlorine residual test. She wipes the test bottle with toilet
paper, adds a solution that turns the water pink and then flies out the
door with her sample, en route to the main lab, where she'll analyze
the results to determine if further treatment is necessary. If not, the
treated water is piped out to Cook Inlet and released.
But we're not released, not yet. We're headed back to the main plant and down bright yellow steps to "the bowels."
Underground, in the narrow corridors that run
beneath the treatment center and connect with outside operations, it is
dim and nightmarish. Fluorescent lights flicker, pipes rattle. We are
introduced to the sludge feed pump: thump, thump, thump, it cries out,
the floor vibrating, the smell strong enough to make our eyes water.
"This dilutes the sludge," Knue says, peering
down, his face inches from the machine. "We've got some new stuff
coming in, some pretty cool equipment."
Then we visit the smelliest area of the plant, the splitterbox.
"Be warned," Knue yells. "It's pretty odorous."
Three of us open the door and confront a huge
bowl of a machine containing the raw sludge piped directly from the
clarifier. The smell almost knocks us over. We stagger and lean against
the wall as Knue goes on and on about solids and sludge and polymer
mixing. He never mentions excrement or feces or even poop. No one does.
Except for the smell, we could be walking through any type of factory
-- that's how sterile and removed it has become.
Until we reach the belt filter press. Then we
come face to face with the city's waste. And there's a lot of it. It
sputters past on conveyor belts, massive clumps of black sludge the
shade of wet asphalt. A huge roller presses out the moisture and
flattens the sludge into long, thin sheets that resemble carpet
padding, right down to tiny flecks of toilet paper and disposable
diapers and whatever else happens to get flushed.
This long sheet is called cake (yes, cake!).
It's belted off to incinerator No. 2, a fierce beast of a machine as
large as a house and burning at 1,400 degrees.
After the sludge is burned, Knue yells, the
ash is taken to the trucking area and shipped to the landfill. Over
21,000 tons of wet sludge are processed each day, he continues, and
most of it ends up in the incinerator.
Then it was over. We file back to the main
area, our heads aching with the reality of miles and miles of waste
flitting endlessly past on conveyor belts. All those millions of
gallons of solids and sludge and cake, all those nice words covering up
the fact that we are human and therefore we excrete waste. That some of
our personal functions don't smell very pleasant, and the necessary
treatment smells even less pleasant.
Senior operator crew leader Mark Newman is
eating a thick sandwich in the lunchroom when we pass through. He's
worked at the plant for 25 years and enjoys his job. Still, when people
hear what he does, they step back. Sometimes they wipe their hands, as
if he might have cooties. He's used to it by now, but sometimes it gets
to him.
"It's not a glorious job," he says. "I mean, come on. We're working with wastewater. We're not exactly loved."
Knue shakes his head in agreement. But without wastewater management, he says, we'd be back in the Middle Ages.
"Disease, plagues," he counts them off on his fingers. "Look what modern waste management has prevented."
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