Blame our fast food diets or restaurants’ negligence for what’s going down the drain. Whatever the cause, fats, oil, and grease (FOG) accumulation has become a pervasive problem for wastewater treatment plant collection systems.
The Great Lakes region was blessed with abundant freshwater for its rivers and lakes. Water as a resource and method of transportation were an important factor in Akron, OH, blossoming as one of America’s early manufacturing hubs during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Among the pump stations managed by Branford, CT, is a long-term problematic station located at Burban Street. There were two primary problems at this station: 1) clogging from modern day trash and raggy, stringy materials, and 2) fats, oils, and grease (FOG) from a nearby nursing home and restaurants, which accumulate and float on the water surface, resulting in a horrendous mess.
With any aging system, inspection, cleaning, rehabilitation, and repair is essential to maintaining the systems integrity. The City of Oakland, CA, the largest city in the East Bay region, certainly has its share of utilities to maintain. The City of Oakland’s sanitary sewer system encompasses over 930 miles of sanitary sewer pipes and includes 31,000 structures and seven pump/lift stations.
The toughness of AMERICAN ductile iron pipe was put to the test on a recent project that changed a significant portion of the landscape in Cobb County, Georgia: SunTrust Park, the new home of Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves.
Enhancing process reliability and increasing capacity are common issues facing water municipalities. On the one hand, community demographics are constantly evolving and water municipalities need to accommodate the impact to capacity requirements. At the same time, older systems that support pumping operations are not getting any younger and as control systems age, for example, it can become more time consuming to maintain equipment and more difficult to find replacement parts after systems have been in place for many years.
Just 20 years ago, many professionals did not consider using variable frequency drives (VFDs) in wastewater applications. Frequency converters were relatively expensive, and experience using them with the special conditions and requirements in wastewater was limited.
In late 2015 Reliant Water Technologies introduced the Wet Well Wizard, an aeration tool for the wet wells in collection systems. During 14 months of field testing the patent pending Wizard System, the primary objectives were to eliminate FOG (fat, oil and grease) caps and to reduce H2S, eliminating it if possible.
Murfreesboro, Tennessee, is the fastest growing city in Tennessee, and one of the fastest growing cities in the United States with its population more than doubling since 2000.
A public works director in southern Kalamazoo, MI, recommended the county investigate new generation Flygt brand pumps for five troublesome singlephase stations along their system.
V-Bio Polyethylene Encasement is the latest scientific advancement in corrosion control for ductile iron pipe. Its revolutionary formulation allows for complete confidence on the part of the owner, engineer and municipality that no matter how aggressive the soils, the rugged iron pipe installed will last for generations. This new technology builds on more than 50 years of research and development by the Ductile Iron Pipe Research Association. By Jordan Byrd, AMERICAN Ductile Iron Pipe
A new pipe-repair solution promises to save time and money, while also being sustainable, long-lasting, fully scalable, and safe for workers.
Wastewater Collection System
Orenco Sewer™ (effluent-only sewer) is a cost-effective, environmentally sound wastewater collection system. With an Orenco Sewer, raw sewage flows from a house or business to a watertight underground tank. Only the filtered liquid portion is discharged (by either pump or gravity) to shallow, small-diameter collection lines that follow the contour of the land. Solids remain in the underground tank for passive, natural treatment and only need to be pumped every 10 to 12 years (depending on the number of residents and the tank volume).
Orenco Sewers take significantly less time to install than conventional sewers. And in an Orenco Sewer, material and excavation costs are reduced because the inexpensive collection lines are shallowly buried just below the frost line. Because only liquid is being pumped, system designers don’t need to worry about minimum velocities and associated grades. This simpler installation process causes less disruption to communities and allows businesses to operate normally during construction.
Mueller Co. recently announced a new H-306HP fabricated steel tapping sleeve. Designed for hot tapping ductile iron pipe and thick-wall C900 plastic pipe, the H-306HP is made from A36 fabricated steel and meets the requirements of AWWA C223. It features an integral bolt flange, Rilsan nylon coating, working pressures up to 300psi, and is available sizes from 4”-16”. The H-306HP is an economical tapping sleeve ideally suited for use with Mueller® CL-12, C1-36, and Mega-Lite drilling machines in less corrosive soil environments.
The Reliant Water Technologies SCOUT Hydro Profiling System is the answer to obtaining clear and concise shallow water survey data quickly and inexpensively. By not only providing a visual hydrographic ‘picture’ of everything underwater, in any shallow body of water, the SCOUT also provides the volume of sludge in the water body (as well as the volume of free water). The ‘picture’ provided is color enhanced in order to provide clear, definitive delineation of variable depths of sludge, or debris, and includes multi-point water depth over-lays.
The Wet Well Wizard is the only ‘one-size-fits-all’ wet well aeration system that has no moving parts, is completely non-corrosive, is simple to install, and utilizes no electricity underwater. It can be installed in 30 minutes and requires almost no maintenance.
The Hydro-Guard® HG-6 Hydrant Automatic Flushing System takes automatic and programmable flushing capabilities anywhere in the water distribution system where a fire hydrant is available.
Designed to increase chlorine residual consistency in potable water systems, Mueller® has added the HG-8 model to the expanding line of Hydro-Guard® Automatic Flushing Systems. Hydro-Guard HG-8 is installed below the frost-line, with all components easily accessible from the ground surface in the Mueller Thermal-Coil® Box. Dechlorinated discharge water is directed to the storm water drainage system or local retention pond. In addition, the product is designed to accept a 1-inch meter.
Maintain your drain with Mighty Mike® specialty tablets and cleaners!
Sauereisen SewerGard Industrial No. 210 is a novolac epoxy that is specifically formulated for industrial wastewater environments where plants and refineries treat contaminated water before it is sent to a municipal wastewater treatment plant.
There’s a new pipe joint in town. It’s the ALPHA restraint joint system launched recently by AMERICAN at WEFTEC 2016. According to Derek Scott, Marketing and Technical Manager with AMERICAN Flow Control, the new joint is easy to install with one stainless steel bolt at the top compared to the 8-bolts-on-each-end, traditional mechanical joint.
Susan Moisio, conveyance and storage leader with CH2M, sheds light on the conditions and obstacles facing municipalities as they struggle with stormwater management.
In this age of data acquisition, there is no corner on Earth that can’t be measured. In the water industry, that means plunging the deepest depths of our sewer systems.
Hampton Roads Sanitation District is using flow monitoring to help get inflow and infiltration (I&I) out of the sewers. Learn why this method will save the municipality millions versus alternative approaches.
Brian LaBelle, Director of Business Development for GF Piping Systems, provides Kevin Westerling with a tour of the Company’s WEFTEC.16 booth. Some of the new products on display include a dual channel transmitter, a series of electric actuators, a lug-style butterfly valve and a double containment piping system.
Kevin Westerling interviews Vaughan Harshman, a district manager with Evoqua about treating wastewater to remove hydrogen sulphide, a main cause of odor and corrosion in sewer systems. Harshman discusses a number of ways to treat hydrogen sulphide including nitrate-based treatments, pH shift technology, iron salts to precipitate the sulphide and oxidizers.
Water and wastewater utilities looking for ways to further extend the life of their pipe have a new tool – AMERICAN Zinc, an advancement in corrosion control for iron pipe. Zinc has proven to extend the life of iron pipe and protects millions of feet of cast and ductile iron pipe in corrosive environments around the world.
