People might not give much thought to what happens once sewage leaves the bathroom, but 23 employees at HRSD, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District, are devoting their lives to the challenge and coming up with faster, cheaper and safer ways to treat wastewater.
“Absolutely! That’s exactly right. This is all we think about.”
Charles Bott is HRSD’s Chief Technology Officer leading research for a program called Sustainable Water Initiative for Tomorrow or SWIFT. He and six other staffers have PhDs. Eleven more are working toward that degree in engineering or science, hoping to better serve nearly two million customers in 20 cities and counties along the coast.
CEO Jay Bernas says they’ve found new ways to remove pollutants that cause dead zones in the Chesapeake Bay.
“We have 12 active patents, six patents pending, 32 active Water Research Foundation projects. That’s the most in the nation.”
Sewage flows through giant tanks, miles of pipes and filters until its clean enough for discharge into the bay, and the district has launched a new project that could make regional ground water plentiful again. The problem of shortage dates back more than a hundred years according to SWIFT’s hydrogeologist Dan Holloway.
“Somewhere around the early 1900’s wells started going into the deep aquifer, and we started pulling groundwater out. If you put a well in, you would just get a geyser," he explains. "From the 1930’s up to the 70’s, growth went through the roof. A lot of water started coming out of the ground, and with that you bring down that pressure like we talked about, and so that water which was always flushing eastward now starts wanting to come back the other way. You start encouraging saltwater coming in.”
To tackle that problem, Bott says the district will soon stop discharging treated water into the Chesapeake Bay.
“We’ve spent a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of chemicals, a lot of energy to generate really high-purity water. We’re discharging that into salt water, and that resource is now gone.”
Instead, the district is spending $3 billion to send that water back into the ground.
A new water treatment complex is rising on 215 acres along the James River. Environmental engineer Lauren Zuravnsky says it will turn wastewater into something pure enough to drink, then return it to the aquifer through 19 wells.
“There’s one behind us and there’s another one near the river.," she says. ""They’re drilling into the aquifer, placing a casing in that location and we’ll be able to distribute the water out from right here where we’re treating it.”
CEO Jay Bernas is confident this new approach will solve the area’s freshwater problems and allow continued regional growth.
“It reduces the amount of nutrients going into the bay, creates a sustainable groundwater supply, protects from saltwater contamination and promotes economic development.”
The reputation of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District as a hub of innovation has led some to call it the Silicon Valley of Water Tech, and its research and development group is now working with water treatment professionals nationwide, with a dozen foreign governments and the Navy’s Mid-Atlantic fleet, hoping to improve the way they manage waste and protect their own fresh water supplies.
