Curtiss to go ahead with WWTP pilot

The Village of Curtiss board decided to go ahead with a pilot program that would theoretically solve an issue with the village’s long-standing wastewater issue.

According to board trustee Johnathan Unruh, the village was told by the Wisconsin DNR that they had a problem with their lagoon wastewater system. The DNR has regulations on how deep your lagoon can go and how close that can be to groundwater located underneath the lagoon. The regulations are designed to keep wastewater from entering the groundwater.

“The issue we’re trying to solve here is that the groundwater is an issue with being too high,” Unruh said. “So if the groundwater is too close to the bottom of the lagoons, the DNR is concerned there may be a leakage from the ponds or lagoons into the groundwater. Of course, we don’t want wastewater to contaminate the groundwater.”

Curtiss’s wastewater was too close to the regulated limit and so director of public works Larry Swarr was tasked with finding a resolution to the problem. He said he met with Ron Williams, an engineer that works with farmers to find manure pit solutions, to see if a proposed plan would work to mitigate the village’s wastewater problem.

“There is no evidence that the wastewater lagoons are leaking but it’s just a rule that you have to have four feet of separation between the bottom of your pond and the groundwater,” Swarr said.

Swarr said the DNR would not allow the village to use the system for the whole wastewater lagoon because it hasn’t seen the system implemented before and doesn’t want the village spending money and time on something that might not work.

Swarr was confident the system, which involves digging a trench deeper than the groundwater level around the lagoons and placing drain tile in the trench in order to get the water to a spot where it can be pumped out to an area farther away from the lagoons. The system would in theory lower the groundwater and give the village the four feet of clearance between the lagoon and groundwater that the DNR is requiring.

Despite Swarr’s confidence that the system would work, he said the DNR doesn’t want to go ahead with the plan because they haven’t seen it done before.

“The DNR is doing their job by looking at [the system] and imagining the worst,” Swarr said. “As much as we’d like to imagine the best, we’ve got to remove the unknown. We’ve got to know if it’s going to work or not.”

Unruh said the alternative would be going away from the lagoon system and installing a mechanical wastewater treatment plant. However, the board felt that option would not be cost-, or timeeffective for the village and its employees.

“The beauty of the lagoon system is we’ve got 13 million gallons of holding [volume] and we’re only flowing about 100,000 gallons a day,” Swarr said. “That means its 130 days from when the waste comes in, to when it goes out. As soon as you move to a mechanical plant, I know at Abbyland in Abbotsford, their stuff comes in and out in 48 hours. So that means instead of monitoring it every few weeks, you have to monitor it every few hours.”

The board decided Swarr should meet with the DNR to ensure the village could go ahead with the pilot system that Swarr is proposing. The pilot would be one-fifth of the scale of the whole project and would cost the village around $100,000 according to Swarr’s estimations.

If an improvement was seen and the pilot is deemed effective, the full project would cost around $460,000 according to preliminary estimations.

Unruh said the plan would help get the village on track for it’s proposed major upgrade. He said at this point, the DNR has been wanting the village to address the groundwater problem at the wastewater treatment plant site before any major upgrades can be discussed.

While the village is fixing the groundwater issue, the board decided to fix an issue with the wastewater treatment plant’s phosphorous output.

Unruh said the village has been performing a pilot to see if it would help lower phosphorous outputs of the plant for the past five years. The system involves the phosphorous being deposited into sludge which sinks to the bottom of the lagoons and is then removed.

The village has been running the system as a pilot so the DNR has been allowing not all of the regulations to be followed as the village tested the program. However, the DNR would like to see the pilot end and a permanent solution, installed.

Swarr said the main problem the village would be facing would be the storage of ferric which is a chemical used to treat the wastewater for impurities. The current storage area for the chemical doesn’t have a secondary containment area so if a tank leaked, the chemical could get into the environment.

“The storage area where the chemical is, doesn’t have any sort of secondary containment which would be required [under the permanent plan],” Swarr said. “Not only is it required but it’s probably just a good idea [to get it fixed].”

“As the tanks age, eventually they’re going to [leak]. We had new tanks when we started the pilot so it’s not that big of a deal but eventually we will want that.”

The board decided to have Swarr talk to the DNR about going ahead with the wastewater pilot as well as making the phosphorous program permanent. After being approved by the DNR, the village will consult with CBS Squared to engineer a design for the trench system as well as create a facility plan to ensure employees are properly trained on how the system works.