Today at the Water Treatment Plant was full of ooh!s ahh!s And eew!s. We rode a charter bus to the Water Treatment Plant, with a bathroom and all. Miss Drizzle and Sprinkles were our guides. There were also a lot of parents and the teacher. My dad came, and my friend’s mom did too! Well, when we got there we were pretty excited. We walked in and saw everything. This the order in which the water goes through to get cleaned. First, it goes through the wooden intake pipe. (This is made out of cedar, if you wanted to know.) It then travels to the screen house, there it take outs the big things like leaves, sticks and the occasional fish.
Then, it travels down to a place where they add alum to the water. This makes the dirt in the water stick together because the alum and dirt apparently like each other, they then form clumps which are removed.
It then goes trough a filter with ash on top, then sand, then fine sand, and then finally rocks, which are all layered up and the water runs through this, the ash and sand catching all stuff that was still in the water.
Then the water runs through some pipes. The light blue carry water ready for the last two steps and the dark blue carries water that needs to do the cycle again, but lets just follow the light blue pipe right now.
After that, the water has some chlorine added to it to kill bacteria. But you don’t want your water to taste like chlorine, so they don’t add too much.
Last, but not least, we add some soda ash and voila! You have yourself a bunch of ready-to-drink water!
Well, by that time we were getting kinda hungry, so we ate lunch. Then, it was back on the bus for us.
This time, we were at the Waste Water Treatment Plant, and yes, it smelled!
The first place we stopped was the scraper. It was so gross! The water would run through this gate thing kinda like the one at the screen house one, but it had this thing that would srape everthing off that clung to it. Poo, toilet paper and even a candy wrapper! It was so gross when it was scrapeing stuff! S-S-SCRAPE! Ugh! Well, then the water was at least free of big chunks.
Then it goes to another big room before it goes to the big holding tanks. This is where the water rests, forming three layers, scum on top, waste water in the middle and sludge on the bottom. They scrape off the sludge and scum before the water heads of to a room full of air.
All of that air causes microorganims to form together with all of the dirt, making little clumps, witch will fall to the bottom and when the water enters the next resting tubs.
These resting tubs also have the scum and sludge scrapers, it’s kinda like an extra step, to make sure the water is clean.
It then flows of a mini waterfall,and is brought by pipes to the Bay!
What surprised me was definetly that some microorganisms help clean the water! I mean, don’t we want most creepy crawlies out of our water?
I loved the part where the water went through the air room in the Waste Water Treatment Plant! We got to walk on the roof!
But, I did have a least favorite part, the disgusting scraper. It had chunks of… ugh!
Well, see ya!
-Hedwig