The highlight of my first week as an RET was a tour of the Chandler Water Plant. My mentor, Dr. Sinha Shahnawaz, was going there to find a location for one of his other water quality projects and thought it would be beneficial for me to see how a water treatment plant works. He was right. The tour gave me the background and implications for the THM project I am working on, it gave me a chance to ask a lot of basic questions (thank you Vickie, Anupa, and Chris for your patient answers), we obtained a few gallons of unprocessed raw water for future experiments, and we got the current processing parameters to replicate.

This is a settling pond.  The design minimizes turbulence so denser solid pieces (floc) sink to the bottom.  About 30 million gallons flow through this pond every day.

They add Alum (aluminum sulfate) and polymer directly into the pipe so it rapidly mixes with the water creating floc with what we want removed from water.

The tanks on the right are filled with salt water.  Inside this building, Chandler uses the salt water to create chlorine (bleach) using electrolysis.

The concrete pillars mark the location of the underground tank holding the clean drinking water ready to be sent to Chandler residents.

Richard