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Show The filter room -- - seems at least a half mile long when you walk it. The operator rides back and forth in an electric golf cart. Plant superintendent Vaughn Wonnacott is at the controls that backwash the filter. WATER TREATMENT PLANT Most people use water to dean other things with little thought of how to clean water itself. But this process is the purpose of a newly completedre plant costing site that nearly 8 million dollars. It sits on an rises east of the Willow Creek Country Club, just west of Wasatch Boulevard about 8700 South. All right then, how do you clean water? Vaughn B. Wonnacott, Engineering Superintendent showed us through the tremendous plant and tried to explain what was happening. Heres the way we got it: Suppose, say, you were a cubic foot of Deer Creek water that had been tumbling happily down the mountain and came up in the aquaduct that brought you to the plant. You'd have some leaves, some algae, and some miscellaneous dirt and stuff. First you find yourself in the 80-ac- screening building where the leaves are screened out and any neavy rocks or dirt drop to the bottom and are taken out. A water spray operated automatically on the moving screens to wash the leaves into a waste trough and they eventually get into a compost heap. a system From there you go into areator basins of vat's where three 200 horsepower blowers blow air through the water to take out odors and tastes. These two basins are each 13 feet wide and 13 feet deep and 470 feet long. Now you (the cubic foot of water) are free of leaves and body odor and are probably Kissing Sweet but you most of it microscopic. still have a lot of junk in you How to get that out? Well, you go into basins where giant are added. on as work to chemicals you go "Chemicals" is rather a horrid word maybe we'd better which isn't nearly call it "Alum" and "Water Glass" so bad. What these things do is sort of like a mud pack on your face. Once you get it off your face is much cleaner. So it is with these chemicals. They set up a "flock" kind of a cloud of fluffy particles which attract the foreign material into itself. With this flock in the water It goes into big flash mixers basins 77 by 60 feet agitated by large redwood paddles. There are other chemicals in the water by this time, chlorine to kill bacteria, etc. and activated carbon to take out odors. From here the water passes through a brick baffle into the sedimentation basins. Here's where the flock goes to work settling out to the bottom and carrying all the impurities with it. Periodically the sludge is taken out by collectors on long chains that scrape the bottom of the tanks. These are 77 feet wide and 220 feet long and there are enough of them to cover a field. now we have the "mud pack" off your face Okay and look and feel and sml1 Tty clean. But there is pre-mix- ing egg-beat- slow-movi- ng 15-a- cre 4 ers another process left- - -- filtering. There are 20 filters, and the building each 35 ieet wide and 38 feet long we'll swear, is a half mile long -- we had to walk it I The water is run through the filter beds simply fine filter sand and gravel at the bottom. Maybe it isn't so simple either. There are a lot of controls and pipes and valves that go to make up a filter. Periodically it must an interesting process. Clean filtered be backwashed backwards water is pumped through the filter and the sediment that had been collected is washed out to drying beds on the west of the plant. That's the process. You, the cubic foot of water are now clean. You go into pipes and are sent out all ovei the valley to people who use you without another thought. But there is a lot that goes into our water. Without an adequate supply of it we have no community. It is perhaps the most important utility we have, the most important factor influencing community growth. This 8 million dollar plant is one of the most important buildings we have in the community. And Another It is a beautiful plant thing and as homes grow up around it, it is nothing to mar the landscape. Why don't you take the opportunity next month of with your children so you'll better apprecvisiting it iate the glass of water you take from your tap. well-landscap- ed, well-desig- ned 1 |