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The City of Ferndale now operates one of the most advanced, state-of-the-art wastewater treatment systems in Northern California, and can also boast that it will not be raising rates to pay for the now completed project.
The current facility serves nearly 1,500 residential and commercial customers with the most advanced treatment methods. Tertiary wastewater treatment is one step above secondary treatment, which was used at the city's old facility. Wastewater becomes even cleaner when the tertiary method of treatment is utilized.
The new plant uses aeration tanks, clarifiers, two aerobic sludge digesters, disc filtration, and an ultraviolet disinfection system. A piece of the old sewage treatment pond has been turned into a wetland, as mitigation for the new facility, and the rest of the old pond will be used as a wet weather flow equalization basin.
Ferndale Chief Plant Operator Doug Culbert said, “The new facility was done and treating effluent on time, to meet the conditions of a Cease and Desist Order issued by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.” The order was issued after Ferndale's old wastewater treatment plant had ongoing waste discharge limitation violations.
Ferndale City Manager Jay Parrish said he was told by the regional water board that city's new wastewater treatment facility project had “some of the most significant challenges to any project that they had seen. To have overcome these challenges,” Parrish said, “is a tribute to the team we put together.”
Culbert also expressed his appreciation to all who cooperated to bring this project to fruition, including Parrish and city staff, state and federal agency officials, equipment manufacturers, project design engineer Manhard Consulting, the contractors and construction companies and Aero-Mod, the Manhattan, Kansas-based company, which designed the process.
”I love coming to work every day,” he said, “we have a facility that we can all be proud of.”
The new facility was funded by a $5 million low-interest loan, and a $3.8 million grant, both from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, awarded through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
In August 2011, one year after groundbreaking on the project, testing of the facility began. With a “gift” of 10,000 gallons of “seed sludge” from the city of Rio Dell, Culbert said that gave Ferndale's facility a “jump start” and helped the new facility come up to operating speed in about three weeks rather than the three month time-frame it would normally take with regular influent flows that time of year.
In September, Culbert moved his office from Ferndale City Hall to the new wastewater treatment facility, and then he and Ferndale sewer operator Steve Coppini spent two days training at Aero-Mod in Kansas.
The new facility has a daily capacity of 990,000 gallons of wastewater. The treated wastewater is discharged into Francis Creek from October to May, near the confluence with Salt River on a one-to-one ratio, meaning one gallon treated effluence to one gallon of water in Francis Creek. Based on the design of the new treatment facility, the one-to-one ratio discharge was approved by the North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board.
The entire system at the facility is networked together and can be monitored from one computer onsite and also from a portable laptop computer. There is a built in alarm system should there be any kind of a problem with one part of the system, such as a pump shutting down or an overflow. There is also a large back-up generator with a two-second delay should there be a power failure. Culbert said an unexpected power outage would not have a significant impact on the facility, and more than likely would not have any impact at all.
photo captions
photos by Mary Bullwinkel/Beacon
1. The headworks of the new Ferndale wastewater treatment plant, located at the same Port Kenyon Road site where the old facility used to operate.
2. The container on the left is the final example of treated wastewater that is discharged from the facility into Francis Creek. The container on the right holds tap water.
3. Sewage from the old Ferndale wastewater treatment facility was piped across the road to this pond for secondary treatment. Now this pond will be used for effluent storage from the new facility during high wet weather related flows.
