Mill Run water treatment plant temporarily offline
The Altoona Water Authority has shut down its Mill Run water treatment plant because the grates that hold the filtration media in two of the plant's 104 filtration cells have collapsed — one cell in each of the plant's two filtration zones.
In-house workers are making repairs, so when one cell is back online in about a week and a half, half the plant can begin to function again, according to authority officials.
The shutdown contributed to a brief constriction of the authority's water treatment capabilities, as the Bellwood plant remains offline due to renovation of that facility and its associated dam, limitations connected with the Plane 9 plant's transition from a 50-50 mix of water from the Plane 9 reservoir and the Muleshoe reservoir to 100% Muleshoe, due to issues with the Plane 9 dam; and due to a water main break that caused problems at Tipton, according to authority officials.
"It was a tight situation," said authority General Manager Mark Perry.
The situation illustrates the value of the "redundancy" created by the authority having seven water treatment plants, all fed by different sources — although the Homers Gap plant hasn't been in use in recent times, Perry said.
The failures of the two filtration cells at Mill Run created a risk of pathogen pass-through, which led to a boil water notice and a requirement to flush a portion of the system — but tests ultimately showed that such a pass-through didn't happen, Perry said.
The Mill Run plant should be fully operational in about three weeks, when the second cell is rebuilt, according to authority spokesman Daniel Ramsey.
The rebuilding of the compromised cells will be done in-house, at a cost of about $210,000, Perry said.
That work could provide the authority five or 10 years of additional operation for Mill Run before a major renovation is necessary, Perry predicted.
The authority has been transitioning its water treatment plants from media filtration to membrane filtration.
When to make that transition is a capital projects balancing act, Perry said.
Work on the Bellwood dam was completed in early October, and the reservoir behind it is filling up. It's about 28% full, Ramsey said Thursday.
The reservoir could be filled by sometime in December, according to Mark Glenn of Gwin Dobson & Foreman, the authority's consulting engineer.
Once water from the reservoir is available to the plant in December or January, it will take two or three months to get the purification processes set up to release water into the distribution system.
Those include the membranes, pumps, valves, controls and ultraviolet disinfection system, according to Chris Eckenrode, senior project engineer for Gwin.
