The Manchester Wastewater Treatment Plant has done it again,
earning a perfect performance award for compliance with its state
water-quality permit.
The Manchester plant, operated by Kitsap County, remains ahead
of the pack, being the only sewage-treatment plant in Washington
state with a perfect score since the Department of Ecology launched
its Outstanding Performance Awards program in 1995. That’s 23
years.
Port Townsend Wastewater Treatment Plant has maintained perfect
performance for 20 years, and six plants have reached that level
for 10 consecutive years. For this year alone, 111 treatment plants
achieved perfect scores — about a third of all the plants in the
state.
Kingston’s sewage treatment plant could provide irrigation water
for the nearby White Horse Golf Course and possibly other uses
under a plan now in development.
Kitsap County commissioners recently signed a $325,000
“predesign” contract with Brown and Caldwell engineers. The firm
was hired to answer a host of questions about the feasibility of
producing high-quality effluent at the plant and then putting the
clean water to good use.
“We’re just starting to look at the whole project,” said Barbara
Zaroff of Kitsap County’s Wastewater Division. “We just had our
kickoff meeting two weeks ago, and now Brown and Caldwell will be
going out to collect data.”
I peppered Barbara with questions that she could not answer at
this point, because the detail work is yet to be done. But we know
from a previous study by
Golder Associates (PDF 18.2 mb) that producing high-quality
effluent in Kingston is more than a random thought.
Golder found benefits from using the water for supplementing
flows in nearby Grover’s Creek while recharging much-needed
groundwater in that area of the county. The Suquamish Tribe, which
owns White Horse Golf Course, has expressed interest in acquiring
the water if various issues can be resolved.
The Kingston treatment plant, completed in 2005, produces an
average of 150,000 gallons of effluent per day, currently
discharged into Appletree Cove. As population grows, the plant can
be expanded to about 300,000 gallons per day.
It appears it would be cost-effective to treat the water to
tertiary standards with sand filters, although other technologies
will be explored. A pond could be built on or near the golf course,
which would store the water for irrigation and allow infiltration
into the ground. The available water should provide the needs of
the course with plenty of water left over.
Discharging into a wetland that feeds into Grover’s Creek is
another idea, along with providing irrigation at the county’s North
Kitsap Heritage Park. Unused water might still be discharged into
Puget Sound, particularly in winter months when irrigation water is
not needed.
One question that always arises with reclaimed water is what
happens to trace amounts of chemicals that pass through the
treatment process, such as pharmaceutical drugs that mimic
hormones. We know from studies that some of these chemicals can
affect the growth, development and metabolism of fish in some
situations.
An analysis by
Golder Associates (PDF 18.2 mb) concluded that future treatment
processes in the Kingston plant would remove between 80 and 97
percent of endocrine disrupting compounds coming into the plant.
Environmental conditions where reclaimed water is discharged would
degrade the chemicals further, so the overall risk would be low for
salmon and other fish, according to the report.
The new study is expected to look further into the risks.
Meanwhile, the state Department of Ecology is continuing to work on
a new
reclaimed-water rule that could improve permitting and
monitoring by producers of reclaimed water.
The Kingston project would be similar to what is happening at
the Central Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant near Brownsville,
where construction is adding sand filters as part of an overall
upgrade to the plant.
Work continues at the Central
Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant // File photo: Kitsap Sun,
Feb. 4, 2014
The nearby Silverdale Water District has installed about 15,000
feet of “purple pipe” for reclaimed water on the major arterials of
Silverdale, including Silverdale Way. The project is part of the
water district’s major pipe-replacement project. Another 2,000 feet
will be added as part of the Bucklin Hill Bridge project, General
Manager Morgan Johnson told me.
Much of the new commercial construction in Silverdale is being
designed to use reclaimed water for irrigation, and some buildings
are being plumbed to use reclaimed water for flushing toilets and
other secondary uses. Ballfields in the area could get some of the
water.
A public-outreach program is being planned to educate the public
about reclaimed water and to answer questions that people may have.
Under the current schedule, the reclaimed-water valve would be
turned on in 2020, but that date may be pushed back, Morgan
said.
In Kingston, it will take about a year to put the information
together and identify a preferred alternative, Barbara told me.
Final engineering and design will follow under a new contract if
things go as expected.
The current contract will examine pipeline routes to convey the
water to the potential users. Costs for building and operating the
system will be explored.
Yet to be determined is how costs and benefits of the reclaimed
water will be shared between the county, which owns the treatment
facilities, and those who will use the water. That goes for both
Kingston and Central Kitsap.
Many golf courses across the country — especially in the arid
Southwest — are using reclaimed water for irrigation. In a few
places where water is in extremely short supply, water systems have
begun adding the clean effluent straight into their drinking water.
Check out reporter Emily Schmall’s story for
the Associated Press.
While water is still somewhat plentiful in the Puget Sound area,
it only makes sense to find uses for freshwater that would
otherwise be dumped into salty Puget Sound.
It seems as if it has taken forever for someone in Kitsap County
to put treated sewage to beneficial use, but a demonstration
project on Retsil Road in South Kitsap is just around the corner.
Check out my story in
Saturday’s Kitsap Sun.
Darren Noon of Pape and
Sons Construction Co. welds a section of "purple pipe" along Retsil
Road in South Kitsap, the first reclaimed water project in Kitsap
County.
Kitsap Sun photo by Meegan M. Reid
Local water experts were contemplating uses for highly treated
wastewater even before “low-impact development” became a common
phrase for infiltrating stormwater into the ground.
LID has caught on fairly quickly as a method of keeping polluted
stormwater from reaching our streams and Puget Sound. The concept
got an extra push from new stormwater regulations, which have
greatly increased the cost of conventional pipe-and-pond methods of
stormwater management.
The less-touted benefit of LID is groundwater recharge, which
boosts our long-range water supply.
Kitsap County’s Watershed Management Plan (PDF 147 kb),
developed in 2005, estimated that Kitsap County’s sewage treatment
plants release 8 million gallons of treated water into Puget Sound
each day. That’s enough to increase the base flow of 10 streams by
10 cubic feet per second, raise aquifer levels throughout the
county or launch a new industry without touching our drinking water
supplies.
“The most significant barriers to recycling wastewater are the
cost of infrastructure and additional treatment, as well as public
perception,” the report states. “Elected officials in WRIA 15 (the
Kitsap Peninsula) have expressed support for public education about
reclaimed water.”
The report mentions that highly treated effluent from the
Central Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant near Brownsville could be
used to supplement streamflows in nearby Steele Creek. But more
recently Kitsap County and Silverdale Water District have begun
working together on a plan to pipe the water into the heart of
Silverdale, where it can be used to water ballfields and
landscaping.
That’s also the initial plan put forth by West Sound Utility
District, as I mentioned in Saturday’s story. Using wastewater for
irrigation cuts down on peak demand, which is what drives water
utilities to drill new wells. Needless to say, drilling deep wells
comes at a tremendous expense — an expense that grows greater as
Kitsap County approaches the limits of its groundwater supplies in
some locations.
To many people, using reclaimed wastewater seems like a novel
idea, especially in an region known for its rain. People remain
squeamish about getting anywhere near sewage water, even if it is
treated. But I don’t believe it will take long for people to accept
the idea of using treated wastewater for irrigation, once they
realize it is treated to basically the same level as drinking
water.
On the other hand, drinking treated effluent becomes another
issue, even though it has been done indirectly for years in many
places. If you live in a town on the Mississippi River, your local
utility may be drawing water out of the river for your consumption
just downstream of where a sewage treatment plant is dumping its
effluent.
There are several other places where reclaimed water is mixed
with freshwater, such as in a reservoir, then drawn back out for
drinking. Ironically, putting the wastewater into a reservoir makes
it seem more palatable, even though it probably was cleaner before.
Treating the water in the reservoir is essentially treating the
wastewater again — although water is just water in the end.
A community in Texas made news across the country last week,
when reporter Angela Brown of the
Associated Press wrote about a new $13-million
water-reclamation plant to turn effluent into drinking water, the
first to be built in that state. Really, it is nothing new, as
Angela herself points out.
What I have not found anywhere so far is a direct use of
reclaimed water. That’s what you would get by pumping the highly
treated wastewater directly into a municipal water system’s piping
network. From a health standpoint, there would be nothing wrong
with that, provided the water could be shut off in the event of a
problem at the treatment plant. No doubt this kind of direct use
will be a little harder to get used to, even in areas where water
is scarce.
Alix Spiegel of National Public Radio does a nice job analyzing
the psychology behind the aversion to using treated wastewater and
why people are more accepting of indirect use. Read or listen to
“Why Cleaned Wastewater Stays Dirty In Our Minds .”
