Brian Slattery Photos
Thank you, water, on Whitney Ave.
Part architectural stunner, part essential public utility, the silver and glass structure of the Regional Water Authority’s water treatment plant was even more impressive up close than seen from Whitney Avenue across the street from the Lake Whitney Dam.
Just as impressive, as it turned out, were the inner workings of that plant and how it provides water to the city and elsewhere — as a group of 30 participants learned on a tour of the facility, guided by Jesse Culbertson, RWA water treatment team lead, as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Jesse Culbertson: "Every day is maintenance."
“We build treatment plants to last 100 years,” said Culbertson, who has worked at the plant since 2006, during Friday morning’s tour.
The original water treatment plant was built by Eli Whitney Blake — Eli Whitney’s son — between 1902 and 1906, in response to the town’s growing need for fresh water and fire protection. It filtered the water with sand, “about as basic as a treatment could be,” Culbertson said. The first water main flowed from the treatment plant south to the New Haven Green, where residents at first collected water there with jugs and buckets before more water lines were put in. It shut down in 1991.
Work on the new plant began in 1998 and was completed, along with the landscaping work, in 2005. (“Thank you for still being our friends during that,” Culbertson said.) It produces between 5 and 6 million gallons of water a day, with a full capacity much higher than that, of up to 20 million gallons a day. The plant runs around the clock thanks to three operators, who each have eight-hour shifts; there is also a constantly staffed control room where every step of the treatment is monitored.
“Every day is maintenance,” Culbertson said, making sure all the machinery is working properly. The process of water treatment is elaborate and expensive, and yet the RWA is able to keep the price of it to under a penny a gallon.
Most water treatment plants are in relatively secluded rural locations, away from the public eye, and are thus “concrete boxes,” Culbertson said. This plant, designed by Steven Holl Architects, is in an “urbanized” place, and responds to that in a number of ways. This starts with the compactness of the facility (“a lot of the equipment is underneath us” so servicing can be “quite a process”) and some of the “really robust” treatment processes it uses, Culbertson said. Also, between the building and the parklike grounds around it (designed by Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates), it’s very pretty to look at and visit even as industrial-grade utility work is happening inside it.
The tour began with the building’s lobby, which, Culbertson said, has acquired the nickname of “the sliver.” The keyhole-like shape of the building overall is meant to evoke an upside-down drop of water. Inside the long lobby, the rough concrete wall on one side symbolizes the untreated water from the Mill River entering the facility. The skylights on the top evoke the filtration process. The clean white wall on the other side from the concrete denotes the cleaned, drinkable water the facility produces. The dark, tilted floor is meant to echo the dam at Lake Whitney (slated for rehabilitation) and the water flowing over it.
Filtered
The water from the Mill River that’s diverted goes through a several-step journey to become drinkable. The first treatment is chemical, with coagulants that bind to dirt and other contaminants. The water is then saturated with air, which causes the particulates to rise to the top, creating a “blanket of sludge,” Culbertson said. The water can then be drained out of the bottom of the tank.
The pH levels (as you may remember from your high-school chemistry class) of the coagulants need to be adjusted constantly based on the pH levels of the water entering from the river. A lot of rainfall can make the water more acidic. Algae blooms in warmer weather can make it more basic. “We’re constantly playing this game of adjusting our chemicals” to make sure the resulting water is neutral, neither acidic nor basic, Culbertson said.
The resulting sludge is “heavy inorganic matter,” Culbertson said, that can be put to use. It’s first run through a centrifuge to remove any more water. The Regional Water Authority then has a contract with topsoil companies, who can use it to add to fertilizers. The tangy, earthy smell of the vat of sludge bore out how this might be the case. In addition to testing, Culbertson explained that eyeballing the consistency of the sludge helped him and other operators make sure this step of the process was working.
“If it looks like brownie mix, you’re doing a good job,” he said.
The chemical treatment is an improvement over previous methods of water treatment, in Culbertson’s view. In a more conventional approach, the particles would be allowed to settle to the bottom and the water taken off the top, rather than the other way around. The chemical process was more “convenient” and more “effective,” Culbertson said. “We can use a lot less energy.”
But the chemical treatment doesn’t totally purify the water. After the particulate matter is removed, the next step is an ozone water treatment, which gets rid of viruses, parasites like giardia, and salmonella and other bacteria by oxidizing them, the same way that oxidized iron turns to rust: it weakens and ruptures the germs at a cellular level. Ozone is generated in water by electricity (as happens in the natural world during a lightning strike). After the cells of germs are oxidized, “the only byproduct is oxygen,” Culbertson said.
The final step in the water’s treatment is a giant carbon filter, “the same carbon that’s in your Brita filter,” Culbertson said, except that the layer of carbon in the tank is five feet thick. But like a Brita pitcher, in the water treatment part, “gravity is pushing the water through the filter.” The carbon filter removes metals, chlorine, and other sediments and compounds from the water. Every 96 hours the filter needs to be flushed and cleaned, even though “the ozone has done the heavy lifting,” Culbertson said. In both the first and third steps, “no water gets wasted.”
The Way The Wind Blows
In response to questions from tour participants, Culbertson got into the way the current seasons — and thus climate change — are affecting the way the water treatment plant runs. The water in the Mill River is cleanest during the winter, he said. Hotter weather creates algae blooms, which requires more intervention, and more demand for water. Right now, Culbertson said, it’s “all hands on deck” to keep up with demand. Fall is the “most challenging” season, however, as higher winds stir up sediment in the reservoir behind the Whitney Dam.
Over the last three years, Culbertson said, changes in the weather cycle has observably exacerbated these problems. Winters are milder, which means the layer of ice that used to protect the water doesn’t form as often, and sometimes not at all. Algae blooms start earlier in the year and end later. Steady stretches of rain happen less often, giving way to a pattern of “six inches of rain” in a storm and then “no rain.” More intense fall storms (read: hurricanes) would whip up more sediment from the bottom of the reservoir.
“What really drives us is regulations,” Culbertson said. Various agencies at the city, state, and federal level have standards for the water supply that the RWA seeks to exceed, mostly so they can keep the price of water relatively constant as regulations (or the weather) change. “We look at regulations as the absolute minimum,” he said, and thus look 7 to 10 years ahead to get ahead of them, from copper and lead levels to PFAS.
Many of those regulations are good for the water supply. “Everyone can be extremely thankful you live in Connecticut,” Culbertson said, one of a handful of states along with Massachusetts and Rhode Island that, decades ago, prohibited sourcing drinking water from rivers that received sewage or industrial waste upstream. These states were “really forward thinking,” he said.
The high quality of the water, they have noticed, has contributed to some businesses’ success. “We definitely take credit for the good pizza in New Haven, for sure,” Culbertson joked. But it has a ring of truth: Frank Pepe’s thinks New Haven water is an important enough ingredient in its apizza that it ships this area’s water to its other locations. There has also been a proliferation of breweries in the area, because — as the RWA has heard from brewers — “it’s good water, and cheap.”
A visit to the green roof of the building gave Culbertson a chance to talk about how the plant life aids in regulating the temperature of the building (which is heated through geothermal wells), and about how the surrounding landscape has, in effect, become a public park.
The tour ended in a large meeting room at the front of the teardrop, which offered a lushly green view of East Rock Park. A question about the burden of regulations and dealing with multiple government agencies allowed Culbertson to summarize the RWA’s general approach; it’s a large nonprofit (and large landowner) with a clear public mandate to provide fresh drinking water. It also has no competitors in the area in which it operates. So “we touch a little bit of everything,” Culberton said. So “all that regulation” is in place for “the right reasons” — because, in the end, “you don’t have a choice” where your water comes from.