By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
Del Rio is ahead of the curve on planning and implementing a series of improvements at its Silverlake Wastewater Treatment Plant, city council members have learned.
Jaime Kypuros of Tetra Tech is the project engineer for planned improvements at the city’s wastewater treatment plants.
Kypuros spoke to the council during its April 25 meeting about his company’s assessments and proposed improvements at the city’s wastewater treatment plants. He said his company had assessed both the San Felipe Wastewater Treatment Plant and the Silverlake Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Once the evaluation was complete, Kypuros said he presented the city with an improvement plan that included “immediate needs that needed to be implemented in the next couple of years,” a five-year plan of improvements and a 10-, a 20- and a 50-year plan for upgrades.
“You all now know what the plants need to take us through the next 50 years. There are some improvements that will be needed in the next five- to 10-year horizons that are going to be significant, so we’ll be planning for those,” Kypuros told the council.
He then reviewed short-term improvements to be made at the Silverlake Wastewater Plant.
Those improvements will include the replacement of brush aerators with disk aerators.
“What we found at Silverlake, while there’s plenty of capacity, from the aspect of flow, what we’re seeing happening at Silverlake is, the concentration, the strength of the wastewater, is increasing, and so the treatment had to be changed, had to be improved,” Kypuros said.
“The efficiency had to be improved to be able to treat that increase in strength,” he added.
Kypruos also spoke to the council about flow projections – capacity – at the Silverlake plant.
He noted the plant is likely to reach 75 percent of capacity within the next few years.
“The point being there is that at this time, we’re below the 75 percent capacity threshold. TCEQ (the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality) requires that once a treatment plant reaches 75 percent of capacity that the plant, the facility, start planning for expansion,” he said.
“We’re already there. We’re already in the process of master planning, and planning for that expansion, so we’re ahead of that process,” Kypuros said.
He told the city the Silverlake plant is not expected to reach the 90 percent of capacity level for the next 20 years.
“But going back to the point I made earlier, the key we need to focus on at Silverlake is the strength of the wastewater and we’re preparing the designs for the improvements to address that concentration,” he said.
Kypruos showed photos of the existing brush aerator technology being used at the plant and another photo of the disc aerators that will replace the brush aerators at the plant.
“These disc aerators provide greater oxygenation to the aeration system, with less maintenance. The brush aerators, they have been a maintenance problem over their life. Disc aerators are stronger and have less maintenance problems,” he said.
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