Inside the bowels of the wastewater treatment plant

If the words “Wastewater Treatment Plant Tour and Barbecue” don’t immediately sound appealing to you, or perhaps surprise you, you’re not alone. I admit, on paper at least, it is a very strange thing to be invited to. It wasn’t until finally arriving, seeing that (obviously) the barbecue portion and wastewater treatment plant tour portion were held in two entirely different buildings that I finally relaxed and accepted the event for what it was.

The wastewater treatment plant run by the Upper Thompson Sanitation District is in need of repairs, and what better way to show this to the community than offering free food and a chance to tour said plant as a digestif. The Trail-Gazette previously ran an article on why a new facility is needed on July 20, suffice it to say the plant is simply old, built in 1971, and is ready to be replaced.

The barbecue started across the street from the wastewater treatment plant, in a building that held vehicles and administrative offices for the Upper Thompson Sanitation District (UTSD). There were various tchotchkes being doled out on a desk out front, can covers that implored the reader to stop flushing fats, oils and grease (F.O.G., remember this acronym) down their drains and toilets, mugs with the district’s logo, chocolate toilets, those sticky hand toys but with a caricature of a piece of poop instead of a hand, chocolate toilets and the pièce de resistance: a toilet filled with Tootsie Rolls. Taking a chocolate toilet but declining a Tootsie Roll, I made my way into an open door.

Inside was a meeting room of some sorts, adorned with various standing posters extolling the virtues of the proposed water treatment facility. I dutifully took a picture of each poster as well as some pamphlets and made my way to one of the main events of the day: the food.

The offerings were standard American cook-out fare, burgers, hot-dogs, brats, baked beans, various fruit and accoutrements for the meat. They were pretty good, as well. For drink there was lemonade, unsweetened iced tea and various sodas. For desert, a cake adorned with the UTSD’s logo; I was a little dismayed they didn’t take the cake decoration in another direction with all the toilet-themed memorabilia on the desk out front.

Now down to business. Before the tour of the plant started we were all shown a nifty contraption. It was very expensive ($200,000) camera on wheels that more than makes up for the price tag. It allows workers to remotely see into pipes and inspect them for damage or other defects, thus helping to prevent the need to dig up pipes in order to work on them. The workers then explained how they can even fix pipes without digging them up (in some situations at least) which saves immense amounts of time and money, not to mention the headache of road closures and the like, something Estes has gotten very accustomed to.

Afterwards we were ferried across the street to the wastewater treatment plant, a grim, Soviet-looking building that is nonetheless the most important place in Estes Park; it is also probably the most scene wastewater treatment plant in America, nestled beautifully in a small draw with Rocky Mountain views. When the wind kicked up the expanse of grass that the building sits in rippled like waves on the sea.

The tour began inside the lab, which was a picture-book example of what a laboratory should look like, filled with whirring machines, beakers a big whiteboard with numbers and Greek letters interspersed on it and vials of strange liquids.

Trevor Byron, one of the plant operators first showed us a table of things not the flush down the toilet, the F.O.G. made up a large portion of items, but there were also things like paint, eggshells and toy cars. The thought of someone dumping paint down the toilet might sound strange, but as the old adage goes, “If they had to make a sign, it’s been done before.” One thing I immediately noticed was the smell, or rather lack of one, so far the building just smelled like any other building.

Byron then began to explain, in layman’s terms of course, how exactly a wastewater treatment plant operates. In essence water comes in, gets treated to remove things that would be harmful to life, and then recycled back into the river. When we think back to all of the awful things factories used to dump in the lakes and rivers we can see how important wastewater treatment is. Imagine if every single thing flushed down a toilet ended up in the Big Thompson?

Surprisingly, a large part of the work is done by microscopic creatures, or “bugs” as Byron referred to them, that eat the organic matter that comes through in the wastewater. If you’re anything like me you might have figured that most of the work was done by machines, and while there are certainly a lot of machines Byron said, “We’re basically bug farmers here… It’s kind of amazing that something you cannot see with the naked eye basically does everything. So we essentially do what nature does on its own, but on a much grander, escalated scale.” One of the plant workers’ main jobs, then, is making sure the bugs have a happy and healthy ecosystem to live in, and making sure there is just the right amount of bugs. In summer, when the tourists rush into town, more bugs are needed, in winter less bugs are needed.

On a desk lay some beakers that showcased liquids at various stages of wastewater treatment. The first displayed what it looks like when F.O.G. is flushed down into the wastewater stream, a gross, solid looking mass more at home in a sci-fi flick than a wastewater treatment plant. As the beakers progressed they got more and more clear. The final product was barely distinguishable from drinking water, just a bit yellowish. “We’re actually far exceeding regulations, but there’s still some floatable things that have no ill effect. It just kind of makes the water that color,” Byron said.

Byron also explained one of the myriad of reasons why a new plant is needed, “In 2025 EPA’s new standards are coming, new standards this plant cannot meet. Nutrient removal is the most obvious – phosphorus and nitrogen. So fertilizers, we literally have to remove them from the water.” If you have ever seen or heard of algal blooms you know how important it is to ensure fertilizer doesn’t end up in our lakes, oceans and waterways.

Just like on land, fertilizers kickstart plant growth. On land an abundance of plants is not an issue because the air holds enough oxygen, but a small lake, for example, can only hold so much oxygen, so when algae explode in population they can suck all the oxygen out of the water, turning it into a dead zone. There are many other negative effects, like blocking sunlight from reaching deeper into the body of water or toxic secretions some algae produce. Some blooms are so massive they can be seen from space.

We left the lab, headed towards one of the other buildings, but on our way we passed through the guts of the plant, strewn with pipes and vats. For the first time a noticeable smell hit me, Byron described it as “earthy,” my less refined nose would peg it as “sewage.” Either way, it is the breaking down of organic matter by billions, if not trillions of microscopic creatures so that the water we recycle back into the Big Thompson is as clean as we found it. When put into those terms, its one of the best smells on earth.

The Upper Thompson Sanitation District (UTSD) is one of two such districts in Estes Park, the other being the Estes Park Sanitation District (EPSD). The EPSD is responsible for, more or less, downtown Estes and the UTSD covers the rest. They are in charge of 93 miles worth of pipes, enough to lay from Estes Park to Fort Collins and back, with about 10 miles left over. In the summer time the plant can be processing over a million gallons of water every day. As we continue to tour the facility it’s almost mind-boggling that a relatively small place like this can handle that much water.

Walking to the next area of the tour, which is outside and free of any smells, I glance at the brochures I have picked up along the way. The one that interests me the most is for DuPont’s (yes, that DuPont) MemPulse Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) system. This is going to be featured in the new plant, and will help them achieve their goals of cleaner water. It looks like a giant shower curtain wrapped around a square box.

The brochure says that the membrane “employs an advanced wastewater treatment process that combines activated sludge treatment with MEMCOR membrane filtration resulting in superior effluent [the water that is put back into the environment] quality at a reduced life-cycle cost.” The thing is also apparently much smaller than competing membranes. DuPont’s website brags that the membrane is used in high-profile wastewater treatment plants around the globe, such as Modesto, California; Incheon, Republic of Korea and Hong Kong.

Back on the tour, we have passed by a giant generator, bigger than some studio apartments in Manhattan and painted the same type of yellowy-tan that you see in footage of forward operating bases from the Iraq War. Trevor Byron, plant operator and tour guide, points to it and says, “If we lose power up here, we can’t lose power.”

Past the generator we stop by the EQ, or equalization basin. It doesn’t really look like anything due to the fact that it’s under a concrete slab in the ground. Here and there pipes and other instruments poke out.

Water flows through the plant aren’t consistent. They vary by time of year, as tourists flood the valley in the summer months there is more water used, but also by time of day – people use less water at night generally. The point of the EQ is to act as storage for water so that when the flows to the plant taper off at night the operators can use the stored water to keep water flowing through. The bugs, those microscopic organisms that help to break down waste, don’t like to be left high and dry, so it’s important that a steady flow of water passes through at all times. “Most cities do not have that because their flows are more consistent all day long. We cannot really function without that here. We can function but it’d be very difficult. The bugs will not like it,” says Byron.

The final stop of the tour is the outside clarifier, which is a giant concrete vat of water that is being, well, clarified. There are two more inside the plant for winter time, since freezing would be less than ideal. The outside clarifier helps pick up the slack when the flows to the plant increase in the summer. The vat is designed in a way that heavier solids sink to the bottom, where the bugs will break them down. There is a giant rotating skimmer that gathers the solids and a water sprayer that knocks nitrogen gas off of them so they sink. The clarified water then flows over the lips of the vat and is collected in pipes to be sent to other bug vats where the water will be further treated. The backdrop of the clarifier is beautiful, with mountain views. A light breeze blows.

There is also an abundance of magpies at the outside clarifier. They hop around the edge of the vat, avoiding the skimmer that is always rotating, and peck at some of the solids that are at the surface before they sink to the bottom. Byron says that there’s no other birds that ever come here besides the magpies, and every now and then a less-dextrous bird will end up in the vat, “They’re not very bright.”

With that, the tour concludes. We walk down some stairs, through the main body of the plant, whose smell I still haven’t gotten used to, and out the front door. Like always, I’m surprised just how quickly the smell goes away. Unless you are inside the plant you would never know what it is. Even the other treatment plant, run by EPSD near the Visitor’s Center, has a noticeable smell when the wind is blowing a certain direction.

We head back to the barbecue portion and I grab some chips and a lemonade, being sure to wash my hands first. There’s quite a bit of people here now and all the tables outside are just about full. Many are just here for the free food, but another tour group is leaving to see the plant and appreciate just how much work goes into keeping our water clean.

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