Water treatment plant updates underway
By Alyssa Schafer, Editor
Updates to Washburn’s water treatment plant are underway, and the $6.7 million renovation project is going well, city officials say. Construction crews will be knocking down walls to make space for a new office and lab and dismantling old equipment to make way for new technology. "The demolition is going well," Washburn Public Works Superintendent Larry Thomas said during Monday’s Washburn City Commission meeting. "It’s moving right along. They should be installing the new clarifier soon." During the renovations, the plant’s two main water clarifiers will be refurbished, and the current gravity filter will be replaced with a membrane filtration system. Right now, water passes through the clarifiers and is then filtered through layers of anthracite coal and gravel. The new membrane filtration system will replace this gravity filtration with thousands of tiny spaghetti-like tubes that work on a sort of vacuum system to suck water through the tubes. Filtration through these tiny openings will cleanse the water of bacteria and other impurities.
