Key West Resort Utilities Maximizes Reuse And Nutrient Recovery

Water scarcity poses unique challenges to KW Resort Utilities Corp. (KWRU), the utility firm that provides wastewater management, wastewater recovery, and wastewater treatment in the region. KWRU began operation in the late 1960s and has worked hard over the decades to keep up with wastewater needs as population and tourism have boomed, spurred by land reclamation and development. 

In 1983, KWRU began a relationship with Evoqua Water Technologies, which provided a 250,000-gallon-per-day (GPD) Davco™ field-erected extended aeration treatment plant. Evoqua was chosen because their field-erected tanks can be set up quickly and adapted easily to meet changing needs — a good fit with KWRU’s step-by-step strategy for managing growth. “The advantage is that you’re able to incrementally increase the size of your plant with the growth of your community,” says KWRU president Chris Johnson, “and still you’re able to maintain an operational environment that’s familiar and uniform.” By 1995, outgrowing the capacity of the initial plant, KWRU added a Davco field-erected treatment plant. By the late 2000s, the utility was not only outgrowing capacity again, but also facing a new challenge with tighter treatment limits of 5 ppm suspended solids, 5 ppm BOD, 3 ppm nitrogen, and 1 ppm phosphorous.