Getting Excited About Wastewater

I haven't been this excited about wastewater in a long time.

I've had three really memorable tours of sewage treatment plants. The first was way back in the stone ages when I lived in Edmonton. I was eager to be involved and learn lots of smart things, so I went the meeting of some environmental engineering group which included a tour of the Gold Bar treatment plant. There are only two things that I remember from that tour:

1. Some of the underground tunnels and such were finished with really gorgeous tile and it was explained that portions of the plant were built during one of Edmonton's many oil booms.
2. After walking through tunnels, viewing open pools of raw sewage and sewage under treatment, big piles of sludge and other glorious things, everyone sat down for a guest speaker on water bourne diseases while shoveling copious amounts of pizza in their mouths. Gross.

The second tour was of the Rehoboth Beach Sewage Treatment Plant as part of a sewage operator class at Delaware Tech. What I remember from this tour was seeing what appeared to be a UV system mothballed, and later hearing somebody that it was no longer in use because of the sunblock being washed down the drain by vacationers. I am not sure if that is true, but it was interesting. I can't seem to find any info on the web about the system currently in use, but I am curious. I've send some notes to people on the tour with me (8 years ago) to see if they remember.

The third tour was this week when I watched this Navisworks video recorded by Paul Walker, our Navisworks TMM. The dataset shown is a real wastewater treatment plant using spray irrigation for the City of Tallahassee.

Hazen and Sawyer is using AutoCAD MEP, Civil 3D and Navisworks to design the project, and our cross-discipline team is using the information to create demonstrations and training material.

We are still building our material from the project data, and this was one of Paul's early drafts, but I couldn't wait to publish it.

Videos like this one- built with real Civil 3D and AutoCAD MEP data from a real project really drive home the idea of BIM for me.

I will post more about this project as my work continues.

Comments

[Tom Headley]

Wow, thanks for the exciting motivation to learn Civil3D and BIM! I am an EIT fresh into my career and looking for smart things to learn in the water use/reuse world. This fits the bill. Great blog!