March 18 2021

Folks,

It never ends

...

Today's blessing is that one of the Sludge Removal Bridges at the Water Treatment Plant has been damaged, apparently from normal operation

^_(???)

If you look in the foreground of the photo, you'll notice that the 3rd vacuum head from the right is curving down into the water

Well we need to get that fixed right away, but it means getting on a boat and paddling over to it

With tools, equipment, safety gear and replacement parts onboard

And probably two people

Which means it will have to wait until we're a little less flat out

We've taken that sedimentation tank offline until we can get to it

Thankfully, we can afford to run without it for now

The weather has been fairly mild lately, so the overall demand for water across the city is less

Which means we don't have to make as much water every day, and we can run on 3 sedimentation tanks instead of 4

To give you some idea, though it's hard to fathom when you're not there looking at it, the plant is operating now at a rate of 200 million litres per 24 hours

We can vary that flow rate up and down as we need to, but what that means is that 200 million litres of freshly purified, high-quality water is being produced every day. It then enters the plant's underground storage tanks where it flows into the distribution network to supply millions their drinking water

We use the term megalitres per day

So 200 million is 200 megalitres or:

200ML/day

Which is actually on the low side for this plant, being around a third of what it's capable of doing