Why would I want to visit a sewage treatment plant? What's so exciting about that?

Mike Wood, United Church of God member who attends the Terre Haute, Indiana along with his wife Amy, is one of the the senior operations managers of one of the most strictly controlled water treatment plants in the nation. He oversees a shift that processes about 100 million gallons of waste water daily, about half the waster water for the Indianapolis area. Indianapolis is situated on White River, one of the smallest flowing streams through a major metropolitan area. Treated water put back into the White River must be very pure, the standards are much stricter than those of cities on the coast or on major Rivers. As he put it, the saying among water purification engineers is "the solution to pollution is dilution."

For about six years Mike and I have been talking about doing a plant tour. Today's tour came spontaneously. Mike and I were visiting Wednesday afternoon over lunch and he suggested that we go then and there to the plant. I said OK and here are photos of the very interesting tour. He took me from the intake of raw sewage from three major lines of the eastern side of Indianapolis. From there the process begins by screening out larger physical objects. Then water flows into tanks where oils and other lighter substances float to the stop and are skimmed off and sediments fall. Then comes the first bio step where waste water is sent through bio filters dozens of feet tall and bacteria in those filters actually eats biological substances out of the water. Then another bio step adds a biological substance to the water that takes out dissolved foods such as milk and the like. This is called "mixed liquor" as it looks like a mixed whiskey drink. Then the bio substance settles out and the water is just about clean and ready to introduce into the White River. In the tank just before release into the river, you can see several feet down into the clear water. Remarkable. The entire process of treating the water takes about six to eight hours.

I was amazed as to how few people work at the huge multi-acre plant. You could count the number of people we ran into on the entire tour on one hand.

Mike says he loves his job. He considers himself an environmentalist and says that it is an accomplishment to bring about this purification. The entire process is natural and the only chemical added is normal chlorine to the water at the very end of the process, otherwise all the bio processes use natural bacteria.

Mike says that the plant is concentration of knowledge from God created in the self-purification of the earth. We are drinking the same water drunk by dinosaurs millions of years ago. There has been no new water created.....the same water has been recycled millions of times....even the water from deepest clearest springs. The photos and video clips give a sneak peek at the process.

Raw sewage arriving through through three main lines to the treatment plant

Control room where we started our tour

There are about 6000 processes monitored at the plant. With screen, mouse and keyboard input Mike can open gates, reroute water, start, stop pumps and much more.