MIDLAND, Texas — Midland City Council approved a professional services agreement with Enprotec/Hibbs and Todd, Inc. Tuesday for a new water purification plant.
This will hopefully avoid another scenario like last week's boil water notice, which led to sediment getting into the city's water reservoirs.
“One of the problems we ran into with the boil water notice was our reservoir got low," said City Utilities Director Carl Craigo. "That allowed some of the sediment that gets put back into our reservoir. That got sucked into our water plants.”
Solids and sediments can already be filtered out of the city's water system by a process called backwashing, but it is unable to clear out all of the sediment.
"When you filter water, it’s called a backwash," said Craigo. "It sends water that you filter through your filters back into our pipeline system. We want to reuse some of that water. Water is not cheap here in Midland. In that reuse, we remove most of the solids, but some still stays in there because we don’t have a project like this right now. So that ends up going back into the reservoir and will settle into the bottom.”
Solids in the water and sediment will be dried up and taken to the landfill to be disposed of.
“So what this project will do, it will actually take that solids, it will solidify it to the point where it dries it, and you can take it to the landfill instead of it recirculating with the reuse water in our plant," said Craigo. "It will take more of that sediment out of the reuse water and dry it out and we can take it to the landfill."
The design process will take around eight months, while construction of the plant afterward will take at least a year.