Sunday, July 16, 2000
Waste not, want not —
rule of water recycling
By Samuel Segrist
Reporter-News Staff Writer
A lot of people don’t want to think
about what happens to the water they flush.
But Abilene water workers have been thinking
they’re missing out on a potential water supply.
About 10.5 million gallons of wastewater
pass through the city’s wastewater treatment plant every
day. A small percentage goes to nearby farms for irrigation, while
the rest heads down the Clear Fork of the Brazos River and into
Possum Kingdom Lake.
Workers are busy designing and building
a pipeline that will make 3 million to 6 million gallons of the
effluent water available for Abilene’s golf courses. With
any luck, that could happen by the end of August.
But there’s still a large amount that
remains untapped. Just how much is eventually used depends upon
water customers, city administrators say.
Even though treatment methods allow cities
to purify wastewater to a drinkable level, people generally don’t
like the idea of filling up a glass with H2O that days ago might
have been running down a sewer.
“There’s a psychological resistance
to it,” said Dwayne Hargesheimer, director of Abilene’s
water utility. “People have heart attacks at the idea of
drinking their own wastewater.”
Fear of the reaction guides water reuse
programs across the state. Wanting to avoid a struggle with the
citizenry, Abilene administrators have so far planned to use effluent
water strictly for agriculture and landscaping. Administrators
must get new permits before the state will allow treated wastewater
to be used for other purposes.
So, while it may end up on the golf courses
come September, effluent water won’t be poured in your glass
for years to come — if ever.
But the options are still plentiful.
The new effluent water pipeline will be
capable of moving 6 million gallons of treated wastewater per
day. The city has state permits to use only 3 million gallons
daily, though it could seek additional permits to use another
3 million.
Under the city’s contracts with the
golf courses, the links have rights to less than 1 million gallons
of water a day. Agricultural uses average about 1.07 million gallons
per day. That means approximately 1 million gallons are left unused.
That leftover amount could be poured on
school and university landscapes, parks and grassy roadsides.
The golf courses are first on the list of
reuse recipients because of the watering system to which Abilene
links are connected. The courses are all hooked up to a line that
leads directly from Lake Kirby, which provides golf courses with
all their raw water as long as the lake isn’t empty.
Since Kirby went dry last summer, the courses
have drawn untreated water from Hubbard Creek Reservoir pipelines.
The water department should be able to easily
connect the Kirby line to a new pipe from the wastewater treatment
plant. The city originally planned to have the effluent water
available to golf courses by the end of summer. The drought has
forced other cities to scramble to complete their own effluent
water projects, and the supply of PVC pipe has since diminished.
Earlier in the year, Hibbs & Todd Engineering
estimated the project wouldn’t be finished until December.
The city council voted to give the firm a $50,000 bonus if the
project is up and running by Sept. 1.
But whether effluent water hits the courses
at summer’s end or year’s end, the city is still decades
behind other reclamation projects in the state.
Water reuse is nothing new to Texas, or
even to this part of the state.
San Antonio started the first recorded program
in the 1890s. The oldest continuous Texas reclamation program
began in Lubbock in 1925.
Today, Lubbock recycles all of its water.
The treated liquid is used in power plant cooling towers as well
as for irrigating farms.
El Paso has one of the most progressive
reuse programs in the nation. The city has a plant that cleans
wastewater to drinkable levels. Some of it is returned to city
taps; the rest is pumped into an aquifer for underground storage.
Eventually the water, now mixed with raw groundwater, is drawn
up again and treated.
Several other cities in the state also use
such methods of “indirect” water reuse, according to
the Texas Water Development Board.
Abilene could develop a similar program
within a couple of years. Water officials have discussed putting
an effluent outlet valve in Lake Kirby. The valve would pump water
into the lake during times when the golf courses aren’t watering
much, thus providing a reserve.
Although it wouldn’t go directly into
the drinking water supply, there is a chance of Kirby occasionally
flooding and spilling into Cedar Creek, which flows into Lake
Fort Phantom Hill. Hargesheimer said the water is harmless; the
city would have to prove that to the state to get a discharge
permit to put effluent water into Kirby.
The permit process would take about two
years. Hargesheimer is unsure if Abilenians, some of whom still
oppose fluoridating the city’s drinking water, will ever
be ready.
“People say, ‘We’re going
to get cancer, we’re going to get liver disease, we’re
going to get everything else in the world,’ ” he said.
“That’s part of it. You have to accept it.’’
Contact water writer Samuel Segrist at
676-6744 or segrists@abinews.com.
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Abilene Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps Publications
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