Resiliency Planning To Avoid Wastewater Runoff When The Power Goes Off
As with the rest of our world, things tend to get ugly when the power goes off at wastewater treatment facilities. Recently, three million gallons of untreated wastewater ran into Lake Michigan during a mid-August power outage at the Jones Island Water Reclamation Facility.
Power to the Jones Island facility, which is operated by the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), was out for three hours from 1:47pm to 4:30pm on August 18, reports The Heartland Institute. The backup gas generators were offline for maintenance when the outage occurred, resulting in wastewater flooding the plant and entering the lake.
Similarly, a power outage at the Northampton Wastewater Treatment Plant in Northampton, MA caused wastewater to be discharged into the Connecticut River. The outage was caused by a severe thunderstorm that hit Hampshire County on August 4th. In an interview with WWLP 22 News, Northampton Department of Public Works spokeswoman Donna LaScaleia had advised residents to wait at least 48 hours after disinfection was restored before swimming in the river downstream of the plant.
The Northampton Department of Public Works worked with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection to ensure appropriate communication, remedial action, and regulatory compliance took place.
Recognizing that the nation’s wastewater treatment facilities are often at risk from power outages, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published a Power Resilience Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities back in December 2015. The guide lays out a plan based on seven factors – communication, power assessments, generators, fuel, energy-efficiency, on-site power and funding.
What’s interesting is how much emphasis is put on having good contact and priority restoration status with the local power utility, something that many in the wastewater treatment business might take for granted as a large power consumer.
Other suggestions are more predictable, such as knowing what size of generator you will need in the event of a power outage and having already determined where to rent, borrow or buy a generator from in advance.
The guide also encourages its readers to consider on-site generation of energy to avoid plant failures from grid outages. Some of the distributed energy resources (DERs) suggested are wind mills, fuel cells, solar panels, generators and combined heat and power (CHP) processes such as biogas.