A $21-million dollar project to improve water service and quality on Michigan State University’s campus is now operational.
People who’ve spent much time on the MSU campus have likely heard complaints about the water, whether it’s the taste, or because sometimes it’s discolored. Red water alerts seem to happen all the time.
Tom Silsby thinks the new water treatment plant will take care of those problems. Silsby is the water works supervisor here. He came to MSU earlier this year with 15 years of experience, rising through the ranks to superintendent of public works in the city of Mason. He was a consultant on the design of the new plant.
In the filter room, large dehumidifiers reduce condensation that forms on the four enormous filter tanks. Silsby compares those filters to a swimming pool filter. Water from more than a dozen wells, each more than 340 feet deep, enters those tanks, and Silsby describes it as unusually high in iron and calcium, leading to the infamous red water known around campus. “The filter plant was designed to be able to filter seven million gallons of water a day, and filter out that iron and manganese and radium that’s present in the water," Silsby explains. "It’s always been present in the water, it’s nothing new, so we’re making an upgrade in the water system and investing in better water quality for the future.”
Raw water comes in from the well system, and these tanks filter out iron, manganese and radium. The sediment that’s removed ultimately winds up safely going into the sanitary sewer system.
If needed in the future, there’s room for a fifth filter tank, and the building could also be expanded should the need arise.
A major feature in this upgrade is the water tower that has risen just off Service Road. It replaces a reservoir that dated back to the 1940s. The reservoir used four pumps to provide water pressure to the main campus. That could have been a big problem in the event of a major power failure. Now, with as much as two million gallons of water at the top of a tower, gravity can do the work when the juice is out. Silsby says the tower was built for more reliability. Silsby says that "as long as there’s water in the tower, it will maintain the pressure on campus, so we have better firefighting capability, better service to the rest of campus, and it’s more reliable because we aren’t dependent on electricity to maintain the pressure on campus.”
Several adjacent rooms house water treatment equipment and materials. in the hydrous manganese oxide room, hydrous manganese oxide goes into the filter stream, before the filters, to oxidize iron and manganese out. Silsby continues that "the radium clings to the manganese complex, it chemically bonds.”
The result should be water on campus that looks and tastes better than before. Silsby hopes that red water alerts will become a thing of the past. “From time to time in the next year or two, once in a while there will be some that has been built up on the pipes, inside of the pipes," he concludes. "We’ve done our best to flush it out, but once in a while there will still be some rust that drops off and come out in the taps. You won’t taste that iron in the water, you won’t get that metallic taste.”
The plant, which began operating at the end of August, is staffed by just five people. It will work around the clock, though there isn’t always somebody on duty. An alarm system that monitors 400 points in the process can bring help within a half hour if there’s a problem.