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| New plant tested Wednesday, July 14, 2010 Carolea Hassard
Springtown’s new water treatment system is finally making the sounds it ought to, playing the notes of running water.
The nearly $1-million pair of Trident filters is undergoing testing now and may go online in early August.
In the meantime, plant supervisor David Northcutt and his assistant, Andy Chapman, are learning the programming used to run the newfangled equipment. Miming the movements, Chapman said, “it used to be like this (turning valves). Now it’s like this (pressing buttons).” It’s just that there are a lot more buttons than there ever were valves - the two have been training with Mike Hinton, a Seimens Trident startup official, for the last week.
Northcutt noted that he’s also learning the new sounds the plant makes, such as when one of the filters starts to go through its backwash process. The men’s primary learning curve centers on the Trident control panel, a touch-screen computer that controls every aspect of the system from water levels to amount of turbidity to chemical feeds and much more. If the flow rate of raw water changes, the amount of chemical injected into the water changes with it. If water levels change somewhere in the system, or if pump pressure changes, the panel will know. The system can be put on autopilot or manual and can be remotely controlled – or programmed – from a distance. On Tuesday, a programmer was checking the system from a Seimens office in Iowa. A SCADA system, or supervisory control and data acquisition system, is also in place to alert plant operators to problems if they are off-site, particularly in the middle of the night. It does happen that the operators have worked at the plant in the dark – in fact, Northcutt was tending the plant until 2 a.m. Tuesday morning because of a pump problem at the lake intake station. “The lake pump wouldn’t shut off so I was making sure that the chemical feed was ok and the town tank was full,” Northcutt said. “Then I knew I could go to the lake and shut off the pump.” The old treatment tanks are part of the new system (they will prefilter lake water when it’s really turbid, making treatment easier for the new filters), but need to be refurbished soon, Northcutt said. They will be drained, cleaned and repainted, and any needed repairs will be made, he said. In the meantime, the city may need to take water from Walnut Creek SUD while the new treatment system is launched. He and Chapman agreed that the water from the new filters probably won’t taste any different. The source – Eagle Mountain Lake – is the same, as are the treatment chemicals – chloramine and a pH adjuster. Until the new filters completely check out, the water running through them is simply being treated with “pretreatment chlorine” and being run into Walnut Creek. The new filters together can process up to 580 gpm, compared to the 400-gpm capacity of the old system, Chapman said. Over the day, the new system can make a maximum of 200,000 gallons of drinking water. |
