Water treatment plant gets upgrade
LEXINGTON, Tenn. — Lexington’s Water Treatment Plant is getting a much needed upgrade.
The L.T. Pie Hay Filter Plant in Lexington is a surface water plant. This plant is one of four in the state of Tennessee.
A surface water plant receives its water from an open source like a lake or river compared to an underground water table like Memphis and Jackson water plants. After the water is taken from Beech Lake, it goes through two filters and has chemicals added to it for purification.
It is then sent to storage tanks and pumped into the city water system to be delivered to citizens.
The leftover sludge, sediment, and backwash that was filtered out of the clean water goes into two retaining ponds. These ponds have to be periodically pumped out by a third party private company.
To remove the hassle of the retaining ponds, the plant devised a plan to route the sludge directly into the Lexington sewer system instead.
“Our sludge basins, we have two of them. They hold over 100,000 gallons each. It’s mostly what it is, sludge. It settles out, clean water stays on top and the new system that we’re going to be using is going to work the exact same way. But we’re going to grab the water on top that’s practically clean, and we’re going to send it inhouse and they’re going to clean it and send it out into the system,” said Lennis Loriol, the L.T. Pie Hay Water Filter Plant Operator.
The retaining ponds will still be used for the backwash. However, the sludge and sediment will now be able to fed directly into the sewer system.
“It takes a good two weeks to clean the sludge pits manually the way they do it. They come in with big crew and big equipment, drain those tanks one at a time, which slows down our making water because we can’t pump all our waste water out there right away,” Loriol said.
The project will cost a little more than a million dollars and the plant is on track to a 10 year payback for the project.
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