Clearwater Road Plant under construction. Please click on the image above to see a larger version in a new window.

Construction is under way for nearly $8 million in improvements that will lower operational costs and improve efficiency and biological processes at the Clearwater Road Wastewater Treatment Plant.

Those upgrades, coupled with refinancing, permitted a six percent reduction in sewer rates that took effect in January of this year.

Authority Chairman Richard Lenker was joined by members John Payne, Thomas Brogan, Paul Clark, Donald Lavine, and Russell Ford breaking ground for the new construction. Skip Memmi, Chairman of the Township of Derry Board of Supervisors and General Manager Ralph Watters also attended the event.

Consulting engineers from Buchart-Horn, Inc./BASCO Associates designed $7.8 million in enhancements that include a 1.2 million gallon egg-shaped anaerobic digester that will be the largest unit of its kind in Pennsylvania. The Clearwater Road digester will be ten times larger than the only other egg-shaped digester constructed to date in Pennsylvania.

Egg-shaped digesters utilize European technology that reduce biosolids by 45 percent. In Derry Township, that reduction will trim disposal costs by $300,000 annually.

In addition to significant reductions in sludge quantity, anaerobic digestion produces well-stabilized biosolids that are nearly odorless. The process reduces odor concerns at the plant as well as during agricultural applications.

Land application of processed biosolids is preferred over landfill disposal, since it recycles a valuable byproduct that's beneficial to the environment and to farmers. Agricultural use of these materials lowers disposal costs while making high-quality nearly odor-free nutrients available to farmers. Unfortunately, farmers are unable to use these materials when fields are snow covered, frozen or too wet.

Thus improvements will also provide a 13,000 square foot covered storage pad to protect biosolids from the weather - keeping the material dry and in the best condition until needed for agricultural applications.

A new headworks building and septage receiving station will improve screening and grit removal for incoming raw sewage and trucked-in septage. Those upgrades will eliminate plastic and other non-biodegradeable materials from the plant and from biosolids and will protect the plant's pumps and equipment from excessive wear and other operational outages.

New, larger motors and impellers will enhance four existing pumps to increase pumping capacity to the headworks building.

Construction began in spring, and improvements should be operational by October 2000.

Buchart-Horn was previously involved with design of egg-shaped digesters at Baltimore's giant Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant.