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| Treatment Plant Tour Part 1: A wastewater facility story |
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| History of plant gives insight to stances of city, opponents |
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By Jerry Raehal
“It” sits just off of South Toliver Road, with Bear Creek flowing past on the north.
In the summer, it is applauded by many for its use of reclaimed water as irrigation.
But the upcoming winter is where it comes under scrutiny by opponents.
“It” is the Molalla’s Wastewater Facility Plant and current Wastewater Facility Plan, and it could change Sept. 19 if registered voters living within Molalla’s city limits approve a ballot measure that would prohibit any discharge of wastewater — treated or untreated — into the Molalla River.
The city of Molalla is just steps away from discharging effluent into the Molalla River, and if Molalla citizens vote in favor of the ballot initiative, the city would have to find a new alternative, as the Molalla River is the listed discharge point for the city’s current plan.
The debate
Opponents to the current plan are not entirely opposed to everything about the plan, and applaud the city’s use of reclaimed water to irrigate Steve Coleman’s ranch in the summer time, at least in theory.
However, opponents claim the reused water is being misused in practice, and irrigation violations are part of their current lawsuit against the city in regards to Clean Water Act violations, which mostly deals with Bear Creek.
The opponents to the city’s plan main objection is over the proposed winter time discharge. The city currently discharges to Bear Creek in the winter under a Mutual Agreement and Order with the Department of Environmental Quality, signed April 23, 2004.
The city first started having violations into Bear Creek in at least 1999, and it was at that time the city and DEQ began working on a plan that would get the city out of violation.
Ultimately, a plan was formed. Opponents argue that DEQ did not approve the overall facility plan, but both the city and DEQ say an approval for an overall plan is not necessary (impacts of which will be examined later in the series).
Because of “fluctuating and very often low flows in Bear Creek,” as DEQ Engineering Specialist Gary Sage called it, the city decided to put its outfall into the Molalla River for winter discharge, during high flows.
Opponents argue continued discharge into Bear Creek wasn’t fully looked at, and with some changes to Molalla’s current system, Bear Creek is a viable option.
Why lagoons are used
Neither opponents nor DEQ officials could give an exact date on when the city began discharging into Bear Creek, but it is believed to be in the late ’50s or early ’60s.
According to DEQ Environmental Specialist Lyle Christensen, Molalla’s plant initially only had primary treatment until the Clean Water Act came into play in the 1970s, when secondary treatment was mandated.
Another problem the city faced with the old facility, located on Toliver Road near the elementary school, was high rains and a collection system that allowed high amounts of infiltration, or rain water seeping into the leaky pipes in the ground.
According to Christensen, because of infiltration into Molalla’s collection system, especially during flash floods, the trickling filter at the old facility kept getting hydraulically over-loaded, causing the city to blow its effluent limits.
“They looked around and said, ‘What alternatives do we have?’” Christensen said. “‘We currently have this plant located here that is getting washed out every year, and we’re having raw sewage discharges into Creamery Creek and into Bear Creek. We need to have something better than that,’ so they built the lagoon system with that in mind, and discharged into Bear Creek.
“They were going to deal with it at the existing plant site, but they figured that they couldn’t deal with the flashy flows with the technology that could fit on that site, so they moved down the road where they could get land to build lagoons and handle the flashy flows. ... That is one of the reasons they went to lagoons, because lagoons are much more amenable to these surge floods.”
David Mann, DEQ professional engineer agreed.
“Lagoons are a good technology for a leaky collection system,” he said.
The new treatment facility began operation in January of 1980. The $2.3 million construction cost was paid for by an Environmental Protection Agency grant and a $650,000 bond issue approved by voters in 1977.
Christensen notes that “they didn’t spend a lot of time evaluating what the water quality impacts on Bear Creek were. That was left to our generation, and what’s going to happen in the next generation, I don’t know.”
However, Christensen and Mann both point out that the city of Molalla had Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSS) — numbers used to determine what can flow into a stream — limits in place in order for winter discharge into Bear Creek.
“I don’t know of anywhere else where they said that the facility has to do 10/10 in the winter in 1980,” Christensen said. “In 1977, that is when this (limit) was first added to that permit. That was so far ahead of the time for normally what people would have been asked to do, so somebody was looking at it pretty darn close.”
In order to meet those limits, the city built a Dissolved Air Flotation and filtration system, Christensen said.
“It was unheard of for winter discharge (to have such low limits),” Mann said. “I remember in 1993, that we proposed that in Estacada, and boy did they scream.” |
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