Plant Operations

Water Reclamation Facility

There were two wastewater treatment plants serving the Town up until 2003.  The municipal secondary treatment facility serves the Town's CBD, most of the surrounding residential areas as well as the Guild area.  This plant was built in 1971 as a primary treatment facility designed to treat 1.3 MGD of flow.  It was upgraded in 1988 to a secondary aerated lagoon system with the design flow remaining unchanged.  Since that time it has been upgraded and modernized so that we were able to eliminate our chlorine disinfection system with Ultra-violet light disinfection.  New fine screen trash removal equipment on the headworks was installed as well as an energy efficient fine bubble aeration system in our treatment lagoons.

The second treatment facility in Town was a large lagoon system that was built in 1971 in the Guild area behind the Dorr Woolen mills.  The system was built exclusively for the treatment of the industrial discharge from the woolen mill.  The lagoons were used up until the mill closed down in 2003.  Since that time they have laid dormant only taking in runoff and storm flow.  It is anticipated that they will be dewatered and the sludge removed from them in 2007, with the lagoons themselves being breached so that they will no longer retain water.

The average daily flow through the municipal plant is 720,000 gallon per day.  Many or our sewer mains are extremely old and susceptible to high levels of inflow/infiltration (I/I).  This results in an unnecessary overload to the plant, increasing the expense of the operation.  While there has been much work done throughout the Town in recent years to replace and upgrade the water and sewer lines reducing the amount of I/I coming to the plant, there is still much more work that needs to be done.

2013 Aerial Wastewater Treatment Plant