Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - NACWA in the News
MAWSS Wins Environmental Award
Tuesday, May 02, 2006
By DAN MURTAUGH
Staff Reporter
The Mobile Area Water and Sewer System recently earned a national award for going five years without a single environmental violation at its Clifton C. Williams Wastewater Treatment Plant on McDuffie Island.
The National Association of Clean Water Agencies honored the Williams plant with its Platinum Peak Performance Award, which it gives to facilities that have gone five years with no violations of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System.
The Williams plant had 200 such violations between 1990 and
2000, said Malcolm Steeves, MAWSS executive director.
Steeves said more than $30 million of work went into the plant between 1993 and
2000, including the installment of a new reactor basin, a 10 million-gallon
storage facility and automation technology. Once those changes were implemented,
the plant began its violation-free streak, Steeves said.
Any violations that may have occurred during hurricanes were not counted against
the plant, Steeves said.
Casi Callaway, whose group Mobile Bay Watch sued MAWSS in 1999 over
environmental issues, said the system has come a long way in a short time.
"They've made a tremendous effort to improve their product, their delivery to
consumers, and their protection of public health and the environment," she said.
All the sewage that is flushed down the toilets of MAWSS customers is piped to
different treatment plants in the county. The plants remove organic matter,
solids, nutrients, disease-causing organisms and other pollutants from the
sewage before discharging it into Mobile Bay.
Violations occur whenever the discharge into Mobile Bay has levels of organisms
or solids above the nationally permitted levels.
Most of the violations in the past occurred when the amount of sewage going into
the plant was larger than the amount the plant could treat, meaning some
untreated sewage was released into the bay.
Steeves said that with the 10-million gallon storage facility, whenever the
plant gets an overflow of sewage, it can hold onto the excess until it can treat
it.
Kerry Hannah, MAWSS sewer operations manager, said automating the facility also
has helped. In the past, workers would manually test the discharge to see what
the effluent levels were. It would take 24 hours to learn the results, he said.
Now, machines take tests and provide instant results, so plant workers can react
swiftly to any problems they find, he said.