Buckeye Water District - Part 4

The Treatment Plant pictured above is a marvel to see. It's big time compared to what we had before the days of BWD. Water is constantly tested from the time the raw water enters the building until the time it is sent out to us customers. The next picture is one of the labs where some of the testing takes place. The water was tested and treated at our old treatment plant but not in the style like it is out in the new place.

When raw water first enters the building it is mixed with chemicals from a two story hopper. It is then put in "mixers" that are the blue gizmos you see above. They sort of look like small old fashioned gas pumps. The blue gizmos are the motors that turn the mixers. From the mixers the water moves to the filtering beds such as you see in the picture with the green fins sticking up out of the water. The water filters through a special sand and filters. There are several mixers and filtering beds. I didn't count them.

From the filter beds the water is fed into those blue pipe lines and out to a 400,000 gallon clearwell. The clearwell is that huge white tank you see in front of the building. When the water gets to that point it is the final stage before it is sent on to the customers.

Water flows out of that tank into our water lines that run through the streets and yards of our village to the lines that go to the individual houses. Treatment Plant Supervisor Todd Brown told me that once the lines are all filled any excess water goes to the holding tanks such as the one up off Route 45 that has been there for years.

That particular tank is the largest of seven holding tanks in the system with a capacity to hold one millions gallons of water. The next largest is the new tank out by the Red Brick Church with a 750,000 gallon capacity. There is a tank that supplies the Elkton prison, one on Irish Ridge, one in Oakmont, Russell Heights, and Springhill.

The plant has the capacity to treat 4 million gallons of water a day with the ability that can be easily expanded to six or eight million gallons. Currently the plant is distributing a little over one million gallons a day. Wellsville uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 to 350,000 gallons of water per day.

This is a rather simple explanation of how water is treated and I hope I got it basically correct. By the time I got to the Treatment Plant I was technically in over my head but was trying to get a lay man's understanding of the process.

In the final part we'll look at some examples of the computer systems that make life a lot easier for the people in the know that work out there.

ole nib