BOSTON FIELD TRIP

Wastewater and Stormwater Managment

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On Tuesday, September 20, 2005, our Environmental Engineering 2 class visited three water facilities in Boston.

The first was Deer Island Treatment Plant, a 370 MGD wastewater facility off the shore from Winthrop, MA.

The tour was led by the processes Engineer. He described how the plant serves over 2.5 billion people! But numbers could not fully illustrate the actual size of the plant. One could not even explain its size by the number of people employed at the plant, because that number is small since most of the operations are controlled by a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system. Overall, the size of the plant alone was one of the most impressive features of the plant. I grew up doing tours at a small 4 MGD plant near my hometown with a sand filtration system. It does not begin to compare to DITP’s biological processes and egg-shaped digesters. Also, the piping through the corridors connecting each process were equally as impressive. They were well labeled, color-coded and were sized from 0.5-inches to 72-inches in diameter!

Shaina Glidden (ENV ENG II, 2005)

The Cottage farm CSO facility in Cambridge,MA: Our second stop.

"Next we went to the Cottage Farm CSO. Here we learned what happens when Deer Island reaches its maximum capacity during a heavy rainfall. This station is what is being added to Boston’s CS system to prevent pollution of the Charles River and the harbor. This tour was also very in-depth and what’s being preformed there is important to the natural water of Boston’s harbor and rivers" (Greg Douillard, ENV ENG II, 2005).

"When heavy rain fall occurs, they receive calls on their phones and have to get to the facility in order to be ready for the storm water. The storm water is partially treated before being dumped into the Charles River. We were able to see the rough and fine screens that the wastewater went through. We also were able to get right up to the outfall tunnel that drains to the Charles River" (Shaun Winner, ENV ENG II, 2005).

BSWC Gatehouses #1 and #2

"The last of the sites that we visited were the Muddy River Gate Houses. I found these gate houses impressive just from their size considering the year that they were built. The gate houses were used to release combined sewer overflow during heavy rainstorms into the Muddy River as a release valve when the system was at capacity. The problem with this is that the Muddy River was becoming intoxicated with wastewater, but at the time this is how the capacity problem was solved because there was no way of separating the wastewater from the storm water. Today the gate houses are rarely used because of the ongoing effort to separate the combined sewers and improved treatment facilities further down the system. I thought it was good to see these gate houses because it showed the transition of how engineers designed things some time ago to how systems get designed with all the technology available today"

(Filipe Cravo, ENV ENG II, 2005).

Here are some pictures taken during the day!!

"It was good to see a replica of one of the diffuser heads that are used on the outfall tunnel, they are much larger than I would have ever imagined and it put everything in scale".

Daniel Dreyfus, ENV ENG II, 2005

The Enviropolis Program thanks Charlie Tyler, Nancy Gallinaro, Phil Carbone of MWRA, Amy Schofield of BWSC and Margaret Dyson of Boston Parks and Recreation.

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