Today we met at the Wenatchee Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) at 7:00 am. Since this was a long tour, we had no other meeting agenda. Twenty of our members braved the cold and smell to learn about the important process of treating the city's wastewater.
WWTP Supervisor Mike Hodgson drove from Omak this morning to give us the tour.
Jennifer, as well as others, didn't enjoy the smell.
This is what the sludge looks like after it is removed from the wastewater. The product is dried into a "cake" and be applied to agricultural land as a soil conditioner, placed in landfills, or cleanly burned.
The initial waste comes in through pipes up to 48" in diameter. The waste goes through a primary treatment (at right), then through a secondary treatment that removes 85-90 percent of the remaining pollutants (tank in photo below). A final process takes the remaining liquid through an ultraviolet filter and then dumps the water into the Columbia. The waste water at that point is cleaner than the river water.
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