King County sent two people to Georgia to study a state-of-the-art sewage treatment system for its $1.5 billion Brightwater plant.
Alderwood officials sent 11 people to Europe at a cost of $32,450 to do the same thing. The Alderwood Water and Wastewater District is planning a $70 million upgrade of its 30-year-old treatment plant at Picnic Point.
Some Alderwood customers aren’t happy about it.
“It’s an excuse to spend ratepayers’ money,” said Lisa Rasmussen, who has lived near Mill Creek for 35 years. “This permeates through government; it’s nothing new.”
Christie True, project manager for the Brightwater sewage treatment plant, which will be built in Snohomish County north of Woodinville, said King County felt a trip to Europe was unnecessary.
“Traveling outside the U.S. requires a lot of justification,” she said.
Instead, the county used information from consultants who had visited other plants, maintenance records and information from having run its own smaller versions of the systems, True said.
The technology, called a membrane bioreactor, will cost the Alderwood plant a projected $5 million to $6 million, officials said. The bioreactors for Brightwater are projected to cost $20 million.
Alderwood officials justified the trip by saying they wanted to see systems that had been in use longer. The plants visited in Europe have been in use four to six years, while those in the U.S. have been operating a maximum of two and a half, officials said.
The difference of a year and a half is enough to make a difference in the problems that can arise at a plant, Alderwood district manager Arden Blackledge said.
True said that while Brightwater officials saw the value of on-site visits, they believed their information was adequate. Some of the information officials received came from a consultant who specializes in sewage systems and who had personally toured systems overseas, True said.
Before going on the trip, Alderwood officials read material from vendors, attended conferences and seminars and visited plants closer to home, including at the Tulalip reservation, and were familiar with the Brightwater demonstration project.
“I just wanted to see the guy who’s got sewage on his hands and how his day is going and whether he’s cursing this beast or praising it,” Blackledge said.
The group discovered information different from what it had heard from vendors and that conflicted with the plants’ own maintenance records, Blackledge said.
“We saw one that was being abused and was still performing well,” Alderwood Commissioner Larry Jones said.
A book published in England and available on the Internet, “Membrane Bioreactors for Municipal Wastewater Treatment,” compares the performance of four brands.
Blackledge and Jones said they’re not familiar with the book.
“I did not use the Internet as a source,” Jones said.
“If I’m going to put my vote down on a system that’s going to cost our ratepayers $70 million, I really want to know about it,” he said.
Some ratepayers, including Carol Lewellen of Lynnwood, agreed with that stance.
“The engineers, leaders, board members have a need to know first-hand how these things are set up,” she said. “They need to ask the people who use these machines, who work on these machines how they function and what problems they have found with them.”
When completed, the Brightwater plant will be the largest wastewater plant in the world that uses the membrane bioreactors, True said. The system filters sewage so it is 15 times cleaner than the secondary treatment used in most U.S. plants, Alderwood officials said.
The south Snohomish County-based Alderwood district with 200,000 customers sent three commissioners, six managers and engineers and two consultants to Great Britain and Switzerland last month to look at the equipment.
On their trip, Alderwood officials spent $170 per person per night for five nights at the Copthorne Hotel near London’s Gatwick Airport and an average of $124 per night for two nights at the Zurcherhof Best Western Hotel in Zurich, Switzerland. The group took day trips to the sewage facilities in the small seacoast towns of Swanage and Lowestoft, England, using shuttle vans and taxis, and one day flying to Campbeltown, Scotland, and back. It also took a day trip from Zurich to look at a solids-drying plant not in use in the U.S., officials said.
Several times the group got up before 6 a.m. to catch buses or flights and didn’t return until after 10 p.m., sometimes skipping meals, officials said.
“It was a very grueling trip,” Jones said.
Food costs in England charged to the district averaged $36 per person per day, and $15 per person in Switzerland. Meals in England included pork loin, steak panini, seared scallops, steak pie, burgers, fish and chips, lasagna, salads and some desserts. In Switzerland, it was Wiener schnitzel, salads and sauerkraut. No alcohol is listed on the receipts.
The Tulalip Tribes took a similar approach to Alderwood. The tribe sent seven staff and two consultants to Europe in 2001.
“It’s always good to talk to people who’ve actually been running them for awhile,” said Daryl Williams, environmental liaison for the Tulalips. Cost figures for their trip were unavailable.
Tribal members also visited a plant in Powell River, B.C. The Tulalip plant began operating in June 2003. The treatment plant, pumps and lines cost between $34 million and $36 million, said John McCoy, manager of Quil Ceda Village, near where the plant is located.
“So far, it’s working great,” Williams said.
Bill Sheets is a reporter with The Herald in Everett.
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