Changes at plants protect drinking supply

Water. It's essential to all of us. But pollution and limited resources threaten our water supplies, and a confusing web of entities controls who gets water and how much. The Herald's exclusive, six-part series examines important water issues facing Franklin County.

Diseases and terrorist attacks are real threats to water safety.

The Milwaukee Cryptosporidium outbreak of 1993, the worst disease outbreak in the U.S. involving drinking water, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks were sea changes for public water plants charged with keeping drinking water safe.

"They created major changes for water plant operators," Ron Snethen, long-time Ottawa city water plant superintendent who recently retired, said. David Buehler is the new water superintendent.

In the Milwaukee outbreak, more than 100 people, mostly the elderly or those in ill health, died and 403,000 were sickened after drinking Milwaukee's treated water.

Because normal types of water treatment such as chlorination doesn't kill cryptosporidium, a nasty microscopic parasite, water plants had to add some significant steps in their treatment process, Snethen said.

Sept. 11 also changed things for water-treatment plants.

Designated as possible terrorism targets, plants went into lock-down.

Forbidding yellow signs on the chain-link fence surrounding the water-treatment plant warn that tampering with it is a federal offense.

Visitors to the plant are faced with an automatic gate and a car-window-height remote speaker.

The fortress atmosphere prompts a wistful look from Snethen. Water plant employees take great pride in their plant and love to show it off, he said.

Since 1980, when the plant began operation, it has never failed a water-quality test and has always met state and federal safety standards, he said.

And before Sept. 11 and the forbidding yellow signs, community groups and residents loved to be shown the plant, he said.

"It seems like the community has forgotten about us," he said.

Plant capacity

"If we had to, we could do more than that for a day or two but after that, the state wouldn't be too happy with us," Snethen said.

The plant produces an average of a little less than 2 million gallons of water of day for more than 5,000 households in Ottawa, Princeton and surrounding rural areas.

However, the plant must be designed not for the average daily use, but for the largest possible daily maximum, Snethen said.

The plant record occurred during the 2001 heat wave on July 24, when the plant produced more than 3.8 million gallons.

Given the city's projected growth, there's plenty of capacity in the plant over the next years but the city will need to expand some parts of treatment process, including additional storage for treated water, he said.

The plant has one underground tank large enough to contain slightly more than one's days use of treated water, he said. There's also more days worth of reserves within the city's holding pools and system, he said.

During times of flooding on the Marais des Cygnes River or plant cutback, the city draws down its underground reservoir, which is beside the front gate at the water plant, he said.

'The Old Muddy Mary'

And in Snethen's book, muddy is good.

Purifying water is the removal of contaminants and killing of harmful organisms in raw water to produce drinking water that won't sicken or kill humans consumption or corrode pipes at area industries or businesses.                                          

Using a process that hasn't changed much in more than a hundred years, the Ottawa treatment plant sprinkles alum in the water. The alum attaches to the floating microscopic bits of mud, dirt and debris, which, in turn, attracts other bits of mud, debris and nasty biological organisms, forming clumps which drop to the bottom of large basins. The water is pumped off the top for more treatment.

"The muddier it is, the bigger the clumps," Snethen said.

Big clumps speed up the treatment process and make it more effective, he said.

As water moves through the process, it sinks through special large sand, gravel and charcoal filters, it's raked by mechanical "scrapers," injected by a special polymer to encourage more clumping, receives exposure to air and sunlight and, of course, is doused with chlorine which kills most microscopic organisms in the water.

Ammonia is also added to the water -- it reacts with the chlorine to form a chlorine byproduct that continues to disinfect the water as it moves through the city's network of water pipes to taps across the city.

Other options

The plant also adds fluoride, which strengthens teeth, to the water and lime to soften the water.

However, after it leaves the plant, the water has a slight "coating," he said.

The city water department also has to look out for those residents with older houses and older pipes -- without the slight film, the water would react with the interior house pipes, introducing more contaminants in the drinking water, Snethen said.

The water department enlists the aid of Ottawa residents -- especially those with older pipes -- to take samples of water from their taps to be used for lab tests, he said.

Ottawa has been fortunate that it's down river from small farmers -- who unlike large corporate farms elsewhere are careful about their use of agricultural chemicals and take care to reduce soil erosion, he said.

That means fewer fertilizers and chemicals and eroding soil washing into the river -- which cuts the costs of stripping those contaminants out of the water, he said.

And that's valuable to the city -- how valuable is starting to dawn on other cities dependent on surface water.

In New York City's case, it's worth $6 billion, the Land Institute, Salina, notes.

Faced with a federal order to build a $8 billion water treatment system, New York, working with environmentalists and small farmers, decided to spend $2 billion to pay farmers along the Hudson River, the city's main water source, to stay on their farms rather than selling to real estate developers and big timber companies and to adopt conservation practices that cut the amount of soil erosion and chemicals leaching into the Hudson, the Land Institute said.