Click the link to read the article on The Greeley Tribune website (Trevor Reid). Here’s and excerpt:
The city recently completed a $35.5 million project expanding the treatment plant’s capacity and improving the quality of water the city discharges into the river. Though the city plans to rebuild and improve the front end of the process, the city’s Nitrification Project mostly expanded the capacity for biological treatment processes that remove nitrogen and phosphorous to meet state and federal regulations…Nitrogen and phosphorus support the growth of algae and aquatic plants, but too much causes algae to grow faster than ecosystems can handle, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Algae blooms can severely reduce or eliminate oxygen in the water, harming fish populations and elevating toxins and bacterial growth in the water…
The city contracted with Garney Construction to complete the improvements at the plant, which took about 200,000 hours of work. Cadee Oakleaf, the project manager, said everyone involved had to plan carefully to prevent any interruptions in service to Greeley water customers. This included temporary piping throughout the plant and working overnight as wastewater collected in an empty basin when work required the plant to temporarily stop a step in the process.
“It was very meticulous planning, planning for months ahead of time at times,” Oakleaf said. “To bring on the new basins, we actually started talking about it a year in advance.”
Lab testing and real-time measurements at the plant have indicated the project was successful at further removing nitrogen and phosphorus, [Tyler] Eldridge said.