City toasts first phase of new treatment plant

The city has unveiled two new million-gallon water storage tanks at its treatment plant on Defense Highway near Parole, part of a projected $40 million plan to replace the present antiquated facility.

"We're bringing it into the 21st century from the 19th," city Water Plant Superintendent James FitzGerald said Wednesday.

He's not far off. The technology used to bring fresh water to taps across the city is built upon the original water plant facilities built just after the Civil War, with major upgrades coming in the 1920s and 1940s.

The new "clearwell tanks" are huge, enclosed concrete domes where clean, clear water is stored after processing before it's pumped into the city.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now requires such holding facilities to be covered. Safety concerns for municipal water supplies after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States also warrant covering the processed water. Two good things that will immediately come of their use are less loss from evaporation and less chlorine vapor escaping from the resting water.

Both tanks should be online in a few weeks and will replace the current millon-gallon outdoor tank built in 1896.

"This is a big step forward," City Administrator and acting Public Works Director Bob Agee said at a gathering to toast the new tanks. "(It's) a long way from when they used to take water out of the stream, strain the chunks out of it and put it in the pipes."

That is literally what happened in the early days of the Annapolis Water Works, founded in 1867. The old city water works, just down the road from the current plant and now part of Water Works Park, was the site of the original infrastructure to feed water into Annapolis.

Back then water was taken right out of the stream, filtered through some sand and fed into the city via gravity.

But pesky bacteria spawning typhoid, cholera and other maladies eventually led to sanitation improvements. First came a reservoir, built in 1907 by damming up the headwaters of Broad Creek north of Defense Highway.

Disinfecting the city water supply did not come until the 1920s. That is when the current water treatment facility was built, up the hill from the original site.

Water drawn from the reservoir was treated for several years, then the city drilled its first well in 1939.

"From 1939 until 1947 the water was a blend of well water and reservoir," FitzGerald said. "After that it has been all well water."

The process

The treatment plant process seems complicated, but is in fact relatively simple.

Water drawn from the wells is treated to remove iron and any bacteria present. That clear water then moves to one of six 20-by-20-foot filter pools, which each hold 1.1 million gallons. The filters have layers of gravel, sand and anthracite that clean the water before it moves to the clearwell tanks.

There the water is stored, fluoridated, and a last smidgen of chlorine added before it is pumped to one of five large holding tanks in the city. These tanks help provide constant pressure for both residential and fire hydrant use.

That water is distributed to some 11,000 customers throughout the city via 116 miles of pipes, city Utilities Superintendent Mike Bunker said.

His biggest daily headache is waiting to react to the next break in the lines.

"That's the main thing and we try to keep plenty of materials on hand for any situation that might come along," he said.

Keeping up

Repairing and replacing pipes and water meters uses up about $200,000 of the $1.1 million water distribution budget annually.

The long-term goal is to replace aging 2-inch pipe with new 6-inch pipe.

Meanwhile, the objective is to keep leakage or "unaccountable water" down around 10 percent. It sounds like a lot of wasted water, but that's actually a pretty good statistic.

"Some municipalities have a 30 or 40 percent loss," said Michael Wojton, a consultant project manager working with the city on its treatment facility. "Ten percent is actually a pretty tight system."

The age of the plant and its components is what drove the decision to build a new facility.

"They are really at the end of their usefulness," Wojton said.

A feasibility plan determined that the cost of refurbishing the aging infrastructure, some of it more than 80 years old, would be close to building a new facility.

"The estimated cost, including engineering and design, in soft figures, is in the neighborhood of $40 million," Wojton said.

The new facility, which will sit next to the old, will be constructed over the next five to seven years.

"Maybe longer for budget reasons, you know, the way the economy is," Bunker said.

Though the city has won awards in taste tests of municipal water, the new plant promises even better results. Not necessarily in taste, but in efficiencies.

"The technology will be more efficient," Wojton said. "It will have lower maintenance. It will be more energy efficient. We will use less chemicals and have more precise instruments."

The hope is that the larger project will come in as well as the two new tanks did.

"The bid came in at $2.2 million for this," Agee said. "That was lower than the engineering estimate. And when they were done, they came in $80,000 under budget."

When work proceeds on the new plant, the tough part will be keeping the old plant running and supplying water at the same time, Agee said.

But that's what happened in this first phase.

"Citizens never knew we were doing it because of the great work of so many people," Project Manager Thora Burkhardt said just before those gathered raised a glass of clear city water to toast the accomplishment.