The expansion of Palm Coast’s Waste Water Treatment Plant Number 2 is now operational, albeit nearly three years behind schedule and fifty-five percent over budget. It doubles the plant’s capacity to four million gallons per day and relieves the city’s older, overworked WWTP1 in the Woodlands, which is also undergoing its own expansion.
During a ribbon-cutting this morning, notable utility personnel and a few other city officials, including Mayor Mike Norris, attended a public event. According to Peter Roussell, the utility’s chief operator, the project signifies not only infrastructure advancement but also our community’s dedication to growth, sustainability, and public health.
When it was authorized for building in 2015, the original Wastewater Treatment Plant 2 cost $30 million. When the expansion was proposed to the City Council in January 2020, it was expected to cost $20 million and be finished by November 2022. The project’s construction cost, excluding design, increased to $30.9 million and was funded by a 0.67 percent loan from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection. Development impact fees are used to pay for the loan, despite the city manager’s 2020 pledge that the expansion would not affect existing residents. The council authorized a 20.8 percent hike over four years in 2018 and a 31 percent increase over three years last year. Therefore, your rates are what pay for these additions, the mayor stated, even if impact fees undoubtedly cover the loan.
According to a city official, Steve Flanagan of the Utility Department blamed the construction delay on unreliable supply chains and COVID. Less than three months after the city announced its expansion plans to the council, the pandemic rocked the economy.
The city’s sewer system is greatly improved by the enlargement, which also removes possible development restrictions. The WWTP1 infrastructure has frequently been overloaded during periods of intense precipitation. The expansion of WWTP1 is subject to a state permission order.
The term “overcapacity” can be misleading, as the general public frequently misunderstands it. WWTP1’s overcapacity does not imply that toilets back up or that it cannot handle incoming flows. Neither occurs. (Backflows may occur from your pep tank, but only if power outages stop it from emptying to the closest pump station.)
Instead, the stormwater entering the system does not carry the same concentration of treatable effluence, yet the system does not process every gallon at the same rate as it should to meet environmental criteria. During these occasions, the city requests that citizens use less water to relieve the strain, not because the system isn’t working.
Up to 800,000 gallons per day can be diverted from the older plant, which can currently handle 6.83 million gallons per day and is growing to 10 million, thanks to the expansion at WWTP2, off U.S. 1 in the northwest corner of the city (where the tragic fuel dump would have been). Utility officials informed the county in 2020 that the newer facility would be used to reroute flows from the Pine Lakes area. Stormwater surges can also be accommodated by it.
WWT2 creates recycled or reused water that is used on lawns throughout the city. Mike Baldwin, the principal operator of the newer plant, says Hammock Beach Resort is one of the city’s larger reuse clients. He showed the train of tanks that filter effluents from their raw state when they first enter the plant to the processed product, with live bugs performing a large portion of the treatment along the way, to a small group of persons who were touring the new infrastructure. Two 400,000-gallon equalization tanks, which are part of the new building, are particularly helpful when processing massive stormwater flows during storm surge events.
The majority of the extension is represented by a train of wastewater tanks that is about two stories high and the size of a football field, which casts a shadow over the ribbon-cutting. According to Baldwin, one of the new construction’s features is its smaller footprint; it uses less room to achieve more, and it’s no coincidence that it does it with surprisingly few smells.
Baldwin described the latest, more sophisticated wastewater treatment technology, which employs a membrane-treatment procedure. Before the flows are treated, they pass over a membrane that removes the majority of the debris. Any extra water that isn’t used on lawns can be released into wetlands as long as the AWT criterion is met.
The legislature gave Palm Coast $5 million for its wastewater project this spring, which includes half of that amount for a new equalization (or holding) tank in addition to the infrastructure at WWTP2, despite the city’s hundreds of millions of dollars in water and sewer infrastructure needs.
According to Roussell, today is about more than simply concrete and pipes. It has to do with planning and getting ready for the future. This is what we’re doing here: getting ready for the future for families, businesses, and the communities that have developed alongside us. Resilient systems that sustain our everyday lives and safeguard the environment we all share are becoming more and more necessary as our population grows.
It was the first appearance of recently appointed Community Development Director John Zober. It’s excellent since we want to maintain infrastructure ahead of need. It greatly simplifies our work. He said, “You don’t want to be chasing capacity.”
