Yay, another microbio field trip!
So for this field trip we got to become a drop of water travelling through the water treatment plant. The process is a lot more extensive than I would have thought. First they must remove all the large waste, this is stuff that we put there from littering or flushing things down the toilet that do not belong there. We learned to never flush any sort of unsafe chemical or medicines or drugs down the toilet, because these can be very hard to remove from the water and can therefore be very harmful to the environment. We also discover that sometimes little animals get caught in this process, we even saw a dead beaver in some of the water storing vats...gross. Anyways then the water goes onto further purification. Then it is put in the vats allowing the different algae and other contaminants to rise to the top, this is then filtered out and the sludge as they call it is used for a different purpose, not merely disposed of. Water treatment plants can sell their sludge to farmers to use as fertilizer. But they first must examine the amounts of microbes present within it. There are different classifications, with a higher rating correlating with less microbes in the sludge. In order to kill some of the thermophile microbes, the sludge must be heated to high temperatures, and we were able to see the furnace that they used to heat this in. Currently they are producing grade 2 sludge, but would like to in the near future make arrangements to make their sludge grade 1.
Before they are ready to dump the water back into the river they add the chemical citrate acid to purify the water even more, killing unwanted microbes, trying to prevent any further contamination of the environment.
Many people left after this, but a few of us stayed to see what took place within the lab. Every day, multiple times a day they must test the water and sludge for multiple different things in order to determine the microbes in them and the quantity of them. They are only allowed to release a certain amount of microbes back into the environment, and are held under strict rules to make sure they do not go over those numbers.
It was a really cool day, and so awesome to be able to learn all the microbiology that goes behind treating water!
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