One of Editor & Publisher’s ‘10 That Do It Right 2021’
Mostly cloudy...isolated thunderstorms developing late. Low near 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%..
Mostly cloudy...isolated thunderstorms developing late. Low near 65F. Winds S at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 40%.
A view of the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's trickling filter system in its infancy in the 1920s at its plant in northeast Urbana.
A plaque on the wall of the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's northeast Urbana treatment plant notes the tons of granite rock that help do the dirty work at the plant.
ABOVE: A freshly completed trickling filter system — a 1.7-acre ‘box of rocks’ stacked 10 feet deep and enclosed by concrete walls — is shown in the 1920s at the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District’s plant in northwest Urbana. LEFT: Rick Manner, the district’s current executive director, stands near the system, which is still being used to treat the area’s wastewater.
This 1920s-era sign welcomed recreation seekers to the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's grounds in northeast Urbana, which included plantings and ornamental lighting.
A sign at the entrance to the construction site in 1923 explains what’s going on.
A 1924 pumphouse, once also used as an administrative building, still stands at the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's treatment plant in northeast Urbana. The plant opened in 1924 after a $500,000 bond issue was approved by voters in 1922.
Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich).
A view of the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's trickling filter system in its infancy in the 1920s at its plant in northeast Urbana.
A plaque on the wall of the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's northeast Urbana treatment plant notes the tons of granite rock that help do the dirty work at the plant.
ABOVE: A freshly completed trickling filter system — a 1.7-acre ‘box of rocks’ stacked 10 feet deep and enclosed by concrete walls — is shown in the 1920s at the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District’s plant in northwest Urbana. LEFT: Rick Manner, the district’s current executive director, stands near the system, which is still being used to treat the area’s wastewater.
This 1920s-era sign welcomed recreation seekers to the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's grounds in northeast Urbana, which included plantings and ornamental lighting.
A sign at the entrance to the construction site in 1923 explains what’s going on.
A 1924 pumphouse, once also used as an administrative building, still stands at the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District's treatment plant in northeast Urbana. The plant opened in 1924 after a $500,000 bond issue was approved by voters in 1922.
Ninety-eight years after it was installed, the trickling filter system at the Urbana & Champaign Sanitary District plant in northeast Urbana is still a workhorse, treating much of the community’s wastewater before it gets discharged into the Salt Fork of the Vermilion River.
It’s also a wonder of early 20th century technology. The 1.7-acre “box of rocks” — as staff members affectionately call the granite rocks stacked 10 feet deep and enclosed by concrete walls — is gently sprayed with wastewater from a series of small fountains. Microbes that make their home on the rocks devour the organic matter in the water and help to clean it.
“It’s simple and reliable. It just relies on space and bugs and biology,” said Rick Manner, executive director of the sanitary district. “They’ll pull the food — what we consider waste is their food — out of the wastewater and thereby clean it up. It’s a very natural, simple, reliable process. At the beginning of wastewater treatment, that was state of the art.”
The first trickling filter in the United States went into operation in Madison, Wis., in 1901. Champaign-Urbana’s system, approved by voters in a $500,000 bond issue 100 years ago, followed in November 1924.
Manner estimated that the trickling filter accounted for about $150,000 of the $425,000 spent on the treatment plant (a smaller amount went toward the construction of intercepting sewers to the plant). Much of the cost of the trickling filter was the 650 rail cars — the equivalent of 17 train loads — full of granite rocks hauled to the site by way of a special railroad siding. The original rocks are still being used.
That $150,000 investment spread over 98 years has cost the entire community less than $5 a day — a stupendous return on investment for all of its benefits.
Treatment of the community’s wastewater in the 1920s not only helped to reduce pollution of the Boneyard Creek through Champaign-Urbana and cut down on the stench of raw sewage but also cleaned the water downstream of Urbana, where for years farmers had complained of horribly polluted water that killed aquatic life and harmed cattle.
“As soon as the city sewage is taken care of by the relief sewers, and that will be within a few weeks, it will be possible to insist that the Boneyard be kept clean,” wrote A.M. Busell, chief of the Illinois State Water Survey. “I expect to do my fly fishing next summer in the stream between the treatment plant and Brownfield’s Woods, and I expect to get some bass.”
That may have been too optimistic a goal, but there’s no question that the quality of the Salt Fork waters improved greatly.
Higher standards for water quality and further technological developments will doom the local trickling filter system. It will make it to its 100th birthday, Manner said, but not far beyond.
“We’re undertaking right now our long-range facility plan, which is what this place is going to look like in the next 30 years,” he said. “We’re likely to be eliminating two of the technologies here (at the Urbana plant) and doing the most advanced version of activated sludge, the biological phosphorous removal process. It’s likely to be integrated here and we’ll take out the other processes in the late ’20s or early 2030s.”
Manner said the sanitary district expects to spend $20 million in the coming years updating its far west Champaign plant and as much as $80 million at the Urbana plant.
Although the trickling filter is efficient now, its productivity drops off by about 75 percent in the winter months (one reason that trickling filter systems are being eliminated in places north of central Illinois), the same time that use of the local system is at its peak because of the influx of University of Illinois students. Further, Manner said, pipes and other parts of the system are starting to fail.
“The problem is that we have to run 12 months a year, 24 hours a day, and it is less reliable for that,” Manner said. “You can see where the logic drives you to say, ‘Let’s scratch out all this other technology and put in the most compact, most economical, most reasonable here, and let’s clean up what we have.’”
The newest wastewater-treatment technology, called biological phosphorous removal, eliminates the phosphorous that can increase algae growth and has led to the so-called “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico. It’s already in use at the sanitary district’s newer, smaller plant in Champaign.
“In the 1920s, the standard (for water quality) was to get rid of the stink and reduce the probability of human disease,” said Manner, who has an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering and a master’s in environmental engineering. “In the 1950s, we had to deal with growth and expansion. In the 1970s, they started to say that you had to look beyond just human health; you had to look at the overall health of the creek and the waterway.”
Tom Kacich’s column appears Sundays in The News-Gazette. He can be reached at kacich@news-gazette.com.
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