AETRA Water Treatment Plant

Last Thursday Q-2 homeroom visited the AETRA water treatment plant. There we saw the 5 different steps the water went through to become potable and 2 other stations. They even showed us an animation at the end about water treatment. After the animation they asked 2 people quiz questions and I was lucky enough to get picked. My prize was an AETRA made raindrop plush toy. For a random reason Amalia and Saige named it Muffin Cheeks. The photo is of Muffin Cheeks. It was amazing the way they took fetid water from the local river and resurrected it.

First AETRA would run the river water through a series of what looked like large metal grates. The point of this was so large enough pieces of garbage would be trapped and not able to go through. To cleanse the grates of the trash every few minutes a gargantuan metal claw would lower down into the water. Then the claw would drag itself up against the grate taking any trash with it.

At the second station AETRA added alum a chemical that makes dirt particles stick together. When all the dirt coagulated it created foam called floc. The thing I thought that was cool about the first 2 steps was that there was no need to go scouring for trash or leaves. They just ran the water through grates and added alum.

The third station, I think was pretty boring. They just waited for the floc to the bottom of the water. But what they did with the floc was pretty cool. All the floc was recycled and turned into other objects such as tiles and bricks.

At the fourth station the water was ran through 1 meter of sand. It was like a giant sand filter, like the one in Bintato Lama. The sand they used though was not regular sand though. AETRA used a custom made sand that I believe to was made out of floc. What I couldn’t believe was that all the grains of sand were the same size and shape. They had to be! If the sand was just like regular sand you find on a beach the water would not be able to filter properly.

Then to finally make the water potable, and especially after sand filtering, chemicals were added. What I don’t get is why did they run the water through the sand? Why didn’t AETRA just add the chemicals? And 1 of the chemicals added to make the water potable is chlorine. Isn’t it bad for humans to drink chlorine?

The last stage that wasn’t really a stage was testing. Testing had to be done to make sure all the other steps had gone fine and the water was potable. When we entered the lab where testing was done the lab struck me as weird. It was full of test tubes and beakers filled with strange colored goop. It was like one of those old mad scientist labs on TV. Except it wasn’t place in a dungeon.