{"id":38,"date":"2008-04-19T17:21:36","date_gmt":"2008-04-20T01:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/down-by-the-bay\/"},"modified":"2009-05-05T15:26:12","modified_gmt":"2009-05-05T23:26:12","slug":"down-by-the-bay","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/2008\/04\/down-by-the-bay\/","title":{"rendered":"Down by the bay"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I took the very wonderful tour that San Jos\u00c3\u00a9 offers of the San Jose \/ Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant<\/a>. Now, it’s true that you need to be interested in water and water treatment to enjoy it; I didn’t take my kids. But about 30 people were interested enough to join in the second tour of the day, and it really was a great tour. We got a bit of a talk at first, with lots of time to ask questions, and then hopped aboard minibuses to see what there was to see.<\/p>\n

First stop was the outflow.<\/p>\n

\"outflow\"<\/a><\/p>\n

It’s really obvious how much water is flowing into the slough; it’s a very strong-looking current.<\/p>\n

Then we went back into the plant and saw where the raw sewage comes in:<\/p>\n

\"raw\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Only about 3% of the raw sewage is solids.<\/p>\n

The bar screens are huge devices that take out big stuff, like sticks and rocks and what is euphemistically referred to as “rags:”<\/p>\n

\"bar_screen\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After the water dawdles through the grit chambers, and settling tanks to let heavy solids settle, it goes into the digesters, where bacteria break down organics into methane:<\/p>\n

\"digester\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The plant uses the methane to produce more than 2\/3 of its own power. A huge use of power are these mammoth motors, that drive the compressors that aerate the water for the biological treatment:<\/p>\n

\"motor\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The water is clarified is large pools:<\/p>\n

\"clarifier\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After further filtration and disinfection, it flows into San Francisco Bay. Some 10 million gallons a day (out of 110 million gallons a day treated) is further treated to become the recycled water that is sold by South Bay Water Recycling<\/a>, which is the reason I went on the tour.<\/p>\n

The tour used to end with a walk in Don Edwards San Francisco Bay Wildlife Refuge<\/a> but today we just took a look at it from the minibus:<\/p>\n

\"Edwards\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I really do recommend the tour.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\nToday I took the very wonderful tour that San Jos\u00c3\u00a9 offers of the San Jose \/ Santa Clara Water Pollution…\n<\/div>\n
Continue reading “Down by the bay”<\/span>…<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wpcp","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dianafoss.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}