From James Baker, Clean Water Plant Director for the City of Three Rivers:
The City of Three Rivers Clean Water Plant employees discovered a foam over from one of the treated biosolids tanks today (Wednesday, July 11, 2012) at 09:44 a.m. The process that caused the discharge was shut down immediately and crews deployed drain blockers to prevent discharge into the storm sewers. It was estimated that about 50 gallons entered into the storm sewer and 2,300 gallons spilled onto the ground around the west side of the Clean Water Plant and Lincoln St. Crews immediately cleaned up the street and grounds. Samples were taken from the St. Joseph River today and the results will be available tomorrow. The MDEQ was given initial notification of the event.
This is the second foam over event in less than a month. We are investigating interim control options and have called upon Thermal Process Systems, the designer of the process to help with the control of future foam over events during construction. Once the construction project is complete the CWP will have additional foam control as well as foam storage.
Actually I think if you check the RCJ archives that actually the 3rd reported foamover in the RCJ archives since April 4th. Some of the articles are pretty much identical…change the dates and the gallons.
OK, so if we spend $7 million to fix a treatment plant a few years ago, then we got to go from calling it wastwater treatment plant (WWTP) to the cleanwater plant (CWP). So what do we call it now that another several million dollars in upgrades were appoved…I mean that calls for another name change I think. Hmmmmm…..with all the foam maybe we change it to BCM (Big Cappuccino Machine)?