New Grand Forks water treatment plant is higher tech, but hopes to stay under the radar

It is dissolved oxygen, according to Fred Goetz, who oversees Grand Forks’ new $ 150 million water treatment facility. The clouds form when the relatively cold water flowing through the waterworks warms up as it flows into an apartment or house. Aside from the clouds and the occasional, sometimes angry phone calls about them, Goetz and other employees of the new plant and its predecessor generally work unnoticed. Goetz hopes it will stay that way.

The new system is a “hybrid” design, meaning it can filter and purify river water with a relatively new membrane system or a more conventional system based on limescale softeners. Water that flows through the membranes has a different pH than water that is treated with the lime. This means another process to ultimately make it potable. Goetz said consumers shouldn’t be able to tell the difference between one process or the other when using city water.

“If they realize that I’m doing something,” he said, “then I’m probably doing my job wrong.”

Grand Forks Water Treatment Plant Superintendent Fred Goetz walks through the pretreatment room of the new plant west of Grand Forks on March 28, 2021. Photo by Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald

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The factory workers moved into their new building in May, but did not pump water into the city’s distribution system until July 17, when Mayor Brandon Bochenski ceremoniously opened a valve in front of a group of city employees and contractors.

The facility is a “once a century” project, Bochenski said at his first address in town last month. It is set to expand as the city grows: water generally enters the west side of the building and is processed east there before being pumped to the homes of Grand Forks. The building is designed to be expandable north and south to accommodate more filtering and treatment equipment.

The facility staff work in pairs, testing the water at various points in their system, making sure the equipment is working properly, and monitoring the entire facility from a buzzing control room they have referred to as “Conn”. Workers almost exclusively use the more modern membrane system to treat Grand Forks drinking water, typically pumping around 7.5 million gallons of water across town every day. The more conventional lime system is ready to shift into gear if the membrane system fails or is overwhelmed.

“We decided on a hybrid plan so that we can always send you, the customer, moist water,” said Goetz. “We tested membranes for five years to make sure they would work for us, but … it’s something new, and as conservative North Dakota we wanted to make sure it worked.”

Zach Bartholomew, chief operator of the Grand Forks water treatment plant, will monitor the systems in the control center on March 29, 2021, which is manned 24/7, 365 days a year.  Photo by Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald

Zach Bartholomew, chief operator of the Grand Forks water treatment plant, will monitor the systems in the control center on March 29, 2021, which is manned 24/7, 365 days a year. Photo by Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald

Apart from the monumental acquisition costs, the operation of the new plant on the western edge of the city costs more than the old one next to the Red River. Goetz and Melanie Parvey, director of Grand Forks’ waterworks, both said it was difficult to quantify how much more expensive the new facility was, partly because it hadn’t been in operation for a full fiscal year. Still, Parvey and other city officials have increased their water treatment budget from $ 5 million in 2018 before construction of the new facility begins to $ 5.5 million in 2021, which will be the first full year of operation.

However, apart from the cost, the membrane system is more efficient than the lime system, and the water it produces is significantly cleaner, even if it looks the same to the naked eye. The old water treatment plant, which used only a traditional treatment system, took water measured at about 70 nephelometric turbidity units – a metric used to measure cleanliness – and purified it to about 0.10 “NTU”. The new system can reduce this number to 0.02 NTU.

The difference between these numbers, like all everyday differences in plant operation, should not be noticeable to residents, Goetz said, but it is intended to be a hedge against “emerging contaminants” in drinking water in the United States, such as fertilizers, pesticides , Drugs that people flush, and the polyfluoroalkyl substances – “PFAs” or “forever chemicals” – that have become an issue in other Midwestern cities like Bemidji, Minnesota, where water is near a regional Well flows airport were contaminated by fire fighting foam that contains PFAs.

For example, sulfates can flow from the Devils Lake Basin into the Red River south of Fargo and then north into the drinking water of the Grand Cities. Ingested in sufficiently high amounts, these sulfates can be a laxative. Conventional lime filtration cannot catch it, but the new membrane system of the plant can, said Goetz.

The new Grand Forks water treatment facility is in its first year of operation west of Grand Forks on March 29, 2021. Photo by Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald

The new Grand Forks water treatment facility is in its first year of operation west of Grand Forks on March 29, 2021. Photo by Eric Hylden / Grand Forks Herald

The new facility can also filter out PFAs, but as of a 2018 test, they have yet to appear in Grand Forks’ water supply. The city will test for them again in the next few years, depending on when the federal government updates their drinking water regulations.

“Yes, the treatment of the water costs more, but we are now protected from future contamination,” said Goetz. “And the goal when we started this facility was that you, as Joe General Public, couldn’t tell the difference.”

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