Unsung heroes treat wastewater in Moses Lake

MOSES LAKE — As the person in charge of the city of Moses Lake’s wastewater treatment facilities, Chris Campbell understands the importance of what he and his staff of 10 do every day.

“I mean, we would be back in the dark ages if we didn’t do this work,” Campbell said as he stood in the midst of the city’s Dunes Wastewater Treatment Facility, which sprawls across roughly 300 acres south of I-90. “We’re preventing plague. We’re preventing dysentery.”

Water bubbles loudly in a series of ponds, and there’s a very definite smell to the place, a smell mostly of algae and compost, though the scent of something much more pungent occasionally wafts by.

Which makes sense, given that if you flush a toilet in Moses Lake, this is where that water goes.

“I mean, amazingly, you know, you get this kind of earthy dirt smell and it really doesn't smell like what it is that we're processing,” Campbell said. “Which is actually surprising and pleasant.”

The City of Moses Lake runs two wastewater treatment facilities, the Dunes facility which can handle up to 4.6 million gallons of wastewater per day and a much smaller Larson Wastewater Treatment Plant which can handle up to 750,000 gallons of wastewater per day coming from the Larson community and the Port of Moses Lake — part of the Moses Lake urban growth area.

In addition, the Municipal Services Department also operates a Central Operations Facility on Lakeside Drive on the Peninsula, which acts as the primary lift station — basically, a wastewater pump — for city sewage bound for the Dunes Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Campbell said that, while the dunes facility can treat up to 4.6 million gallons per day, typically, city residents only produce around 2.1 million gallons of wastewater on an average day, out of which about 100 pounds of things that cannot be treated — everything from disposable wipes to children’s toys to cell phones — are filtered out and taken to the county landfill.

“The flushable wipes are actually causing quite a problem for a lot of treatment plants in the area,” Campbell said. “They flush just fine, they just don’t break down. They’re more fibrous than toilet tissue.”

The real work at a wastewater treatment plant is done by bacteria, Cambpell said, which break down the solid, organic matter in the water — nearly four tons every day. A gallon of wastewater will spend about two months circulating through these ponds, while air bubbles up from the bottom and bacteria eat their way through the solid waste and release as much nitrogen back into the air as possible, Campbell said.

“We take in 7,700 pounds of nutrients,” Campbell said. “And we only have 132 pounds of nutrients leaving the plant. These reactors constantly are 97 to 99% efficient.”

The brown clumps floating in the treatment plant’s reactor ponds aren’t what you might think, Campbell said. Rather, they are mats of algae that form in the water, places where green shoots of duckweed can sprout and the koi that feed on the duckweed in the reactor ponds can hide.

In fact, Campbell said the treatment plant is host to all sorts of wildlife year-round.

“We get deer,” he said, noting that a line of trees south of the reactor ponds are home to several small herds of deer. “We get a lot of waterfowl here during the winter months. It’s the only open warm body of water.”

Once the water is finished being treated in the reactor ponds, Campbell said the heavier solids — mostly bacteria and algae, and very little feces — are strained out and the wastewater is then run under ultraviolet lighting to treat any remaining bacteria. The UV lights don’t kill the bacteria, Campbell said, but rather render them infertile.

What’s left — which is fairly clean-looking water — is pumped to a series of ponds where it will slowly filter through sand and back down into the aquifer below.

“Basically, it's replenishing the aquifer,” he said of the final treated water. “The work that we're doing today that my staff does, isn't necessarily affecting us now. Our work is affecting our children and our children's children, and even their children. So the work that we're doing right now we'll see the results of 50 to 100 years from now.”

Campbell also said the city does not use any chemicals anywhere in the treatment process.

The solids will sit in a lined pond where the water will evaporate, after which crews will take the remaining organic matter and spread it in on pivot-irrigated, commercial sod fields as fertilizer.

“It's full circle,” he said. “We're taking our municipal waste product. And now it's plant life. It's green again. It’s reused. It’s recycled.”

A host of state and federal clean water regulations govern how the facility operates, Campbell said, with water tested constantly throughout the process and monitoring wells nearby to measure the quality of the water as it percolates back down into the ground. However, a wall covered with awards notes how well the city of Moses Lake has adhered to those guidelines over the years, Campbell said.

Of the over 300 wastewater treatment facilities in Washington state, Campbell said only a third of them received awards. And two of them — Dunes and Larson — are in Moses Lake.

It’s not glamorous work, but it is necessary and important work that makes civilization possible, Campbell said.

“I love doing this work,” he said. “I’ve always taken great pride in the fact that we are protecting the community.”

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.