Originally posted by CWEA Director, Logan Olds, on 08/15/2010 in San Berdardino Sun
Workforce investment programs that work are those programs that prepare people for careers and do so by focusing on growing job markets.
We all know that teaching someone how to prepare their resume on a computer certainly won’t make them a fierce competitor in the current job market. But train that individual with specific skills in a rapidly growing field, such as wastewater management, and chances are very good they’ll lock down a solid job.
Unknown to most people, wastewater management is a specialized field where 47.6percent of the national workforce is on the fast track to retirement within the next five years. This important statistic is just one of the many factors we look for when developing successful job placement programs such as those we have created here in San Bernardino County.
The National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA) has awarded the East Bay Municipal Utility District its Platinum 10 Award, recognizing the District for operating its Main Wastewater Treatment Plant in Oakland for 10 consecutive years without a violation of its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permit.
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The U.S. Supreme Court on June 1 refused to hear claims from the city of Los Angeles that the Kern County sludge ban violated the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution. As is customary, the court did not explain its decision not to hear the challenge to the Kern County ban. Approved in 2006, Measure E made it illegal to spread biosolids on farmland as fertilizer. Los Angeles, Orange County and the businesses that haul and spread their waste here filed a lawsuit with a number of claims against Measure E. The June 1 Supreme Court decision not to take L.A.’s case leaves in place a previous victory for Kern County in the form of rulings by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that declared Measure E did not illegally hamper interstate commerce protections. The Supreme Court action removes the last federal claim against Measure E — leaving only two state-level legal challenges to the sludge ban’s validity: a claim that Measure E violated state recycling rules in the Integrated Waste Management Act and that Kern County overstepped its police powers by creating a law that polices another government entity.
The public perception towards water recycling is getting a bit more positive – this time the architecture blog mammoth hails water reuse as the future.
The blog names the innovative Groundwater Replenishment System in Fountain Valley as one of the top architecture projects of the decade. The plant is jointly owned by the Orange County Water District and Orange County Sanitation District.
From the 1/15/2010 Santa Cruz Sentinel, by Jondi Bumz
FELTON — Local engineer Peter Haase took 10 Chinese officials on a tour of wastewater treatments systems in Santa Cruz County on Thursday.
The group, which includes municipal and national officials, visited two projects in the morning in Felton, including one at San Lorenzo Valley High School built in 2003, lunched in Santa Cruz and visited two more sites in the afternoon, including Parkhurst Terrace in Aptos, built in 2006.
Haase, the principal engineer at Fall Creek Engineering, is consulting with the Chinese as part of a $100 million wastewater project to bring sanitation to 200 villages in the municipality of Ningbo, Zhejiang, in southeast China.The project will serve an area with 6 million people, about the size of the San Francisco Bay Area.
Haase designs biological treatment systems that purify wastewater with the help of aquatic flora and fauna rather than using chemical-intensive systems. He has made four trips to China in the past six months for the project, which presents many challenges. Among them are training Chinese engineers how to design natural treatment sanitary sewer systems that fit into the landscape.
“Many of the villages are ancient villages set in what is referred to as the Peak District in the mountains,” Haase said. “Each house is set at a different grade and there are not roads, just foot paths, which means many of the projects will need to be constructed by hand.”
Haase said the Chinese government must be willing to convert small plots of agricultural land to natural treatment systems. “Growing food is a critical issue so finding a balance between food production and environmental protection presents a unique set of issues,” Haase said. “Fortunately in a natural pond/wetland-based treatment system, we can grow agricultural crops, which bridges these two issues nicely.”
The State funded Santa Monica Bay Commission issues a report every five years and this year's shows healthy improvement in habitat and water quality. The report credits secondary treatment improvements at the City's Hyperion wastewater treatment plant and CSDLC's JWPCP in Carson. (credit:Flickr/Tim_Tolle)
Patrizia Hall
LABS Blogger
The Santa Monica Bay’s dry-weather water quality record has improved and some habitats have rebounded since the release of a report five years ago on the Bay’s environmental health.
But the latest analysis of the waters off the South Bay coastline points to some lingering problems, including DDT contamination from the 1970s, contaminated seafood, threatened fish populations and pollution caused by wet weather stormwater discharge.
Link to 2010 State of the Bay Report published by the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Commission
Soledad’s new 5-mgd wastewater treatment plant gets featured on the local news. Local officials sound thrilled to have the plant operating and look forward to growth and prosperity for their community. The facility allows the City to lift a moratorium on new construction.
What does the new plant mean to the community? The Chamber of Commerce spokesperson believes…
It means we can do more development, bring more new homes to our people and more work for our people.
View the video on KSBW’s website here, go>
The consulting engineer and construction manager for the expansion was Black & Veatch. Shimmick Construction built the expansion.
The new biosolids drying facility is operating at VRSD’s Toland Road Landfill and turns sludge from seven regional wastewater treatment plants into dried landfill cover material. The system started up in November and is powered entirely by gas captured from the landfill.
It’s the first of its kind, so we’ve been doing things slowly to make sure everything is done properly said Mark Lawler, VRSD’s General Manager
Read the story on Biomass magazine’s website.
See Mark’s presentation on VRSD’s system at next week’s CWEA one-day biosolids conference. “Biosolids: Understanding Future Regulatory Trends and Impacts on Biosolids Management in California” occurs on Jan. 26th in Whittier and Jan 27th in San Francisco. Flyer and RSVP details here.
A Seattle PI story about the Emerald City’s FOG problem is getting plenty of attention today – possibly because of the two cool (though some commenters call them gross) videos of grease clogged sewer lines.
Seattle Public Utilities estimates 544,000 gallons of grease get into Seattle’s wastewater collection system every month. They’re on a campaign to cut back the grease (as nearly all wastewater utilities and collections managers are trying to do).
Money quote from a surprised deli owner:
“I really felt like we didn’t put out much grease and that it would be waste of time. But I was shocked to see how much grease we put out. It was kind of embarrassing,” he said. “I never looked at ice cream as grease. We were just rinsing the pans, and dumping ice cream rinse water in there.”
He paid about $3,000 for the grease trap, he said, but didn’t mind spending the money, since it also helps keep his side sewer clear.
The story was picked up by: USA Today’s Green House blog; Mother Nature Network; WaterTech Online and others.
Bottomline message everyone – never pour grease or greasy food scraps down the drain – it clogs the sewers!
Get a full day of detailed FOG training at the P3S Conference in Long Beach March 1-3. Conference catalog and sign-up here, go>
Water and Wastes Digest magazine recognized the Soledad Water Reclamation Facility and the All American Canal Lining Project as two of the top 10 water initiatives of 2009. Selected among the tens of thousands of water and wastewater projects and upgrades around the country last year, both winners innovated to improve California’s water supplies.
Award-winning City of Soledad WWTP
The magazine praised the City of Soledad for finishing its advanced WWTP upgrade project ahead of schedule and for its persistence in acquiring a $4 million California Proposition 50 grant. The $60 million plant will be able to treat about 5.6 million gallons of wastewater a day — compared with 2.7 million before the expansion. Treated water will also be used for landscaping.
