Quincy council passes water plan

QUINCY — The Quincy City Council unanimously approved on Tuesday a city-wide water plan designed to not only remove industrial wastewater from the city’s residential waste, but also treat that industrial wastewater so that it can be reused by the city’s many industrial customers — especially its data centers.

According to City Attorney Allan Galbraith, the plan — which was passed as an ordinance — is the result of a nearly 10-year-old agreement with the Bureau of Reclamation to eliminate the discharge from Quincy’s water treatment plant into the Bureau’s canal that forms much of Quincy’s southern border.

“We’re going to reuse industrial waste as much as we can,” Galbraith told the city council.

That agreement, which was set to expire, has been extended for another five years, Galbraith said.

Businesses and homes in Quincy use between 4 million and 4.5 million gallons per day, according to Emil Voges, the consulting engineer who helped draft the water plan.

“Sixty percent of that is used by industrial users that can use recycled water,” Voges told the city council.

Quincy is currently building an industrial waste water treatment plant to treat and recycle water and send it back to industrial users like data centers.

“A lot can be done to bring reclaimed water back for uses you don’t need potable water for,” Vogues said.

Treated waster water is better for cooling systems, Vogues said, noting that while water pumped from the city’s wells is pure enough for drinking, it also has a number of harder elements — such as calcium — that have to be removed before it can be used in data center cooling towers.

In fact, treating and reusing industrial waste water will free up ground water for homes and apartments, Vogues added. He said Microsoft currently has a well and a water right on one of its campuses that it would like to surrender to the city once the industrial reuse facility starts producing filtered water.

Eventually, the city intends to use treated and filtered water for irrigation and pump some of it back into the aquifer, Vogues said.

Galbraith said the plan is designed to change over time as circumstances or technology change.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.