Camp Steiner, Utah Case Study

Located at 10,400 feet in the Uintah Mountains of Utah, Camp Steiner is the highest Boy Scout camp in the United States. Previously, the Great Salt Lake Council (GSLC) of the Boy Scouts of America used a 3.0 and 0.5 micron bag filter system to treat the water for the scouts that attend the camp each summer. After every 300 to 400 gallons of treatment, fouling would cause the bag filters to blind off. This cost the GSLC $60,000 each summer in bag filter replacements, in addition to the considerable labor required to operate and maintain the system. Through an exhaustive study, the AltaPac™ ultrafiltration membrane system was determined to be the preferred option for a replacement system due to its small footprint, low installation cost, high quality finished water, ease of operation, transportability, and low maintenance and monitoring requirements.

WesTech worked directly with the GSLC and provided an AltaPac™ to Camp Steiner in July 2008. Throughout the summer, the system treated water from both Scout Lake and a nearby spring, with raw water turbidities up to 5 NTU. The raw water first passed through a 200 micron pre-strainer and then through two ultrafiltration membranes with a pore size of 0.01 micron, producing filtered water with an average turbidity of 0.022 NTU. The ultrafiltration membrane removed all coliforms that were present in the raw water, and reduced the heterotrophic plate count from 470 CFU/mL to the detection limit of <1 CFU/mL. From the filtered water tank of the AltaPac™, a submersible transfer pump was used to pump the water to the 16,000 gallon storage tank. The system demonstrated a permeate production rate up to 70 gpm, was backwashed every 120 minutes, and did not require a chemical clean throughout the summer.