Published: July 04, 2009 09:00 pm      

Don Cope: Managing our water system

This is our fourth article in a series about the operations of Dalton Utilities. In today’s article, we will discuss the concept of watershed management. Watershed management encompasses all of the issues which impact water quantity and quality — which include water (supply, treatment and distribution); wastewater (collection and treatment); and stormwater management (erosion control). Much like a three-legged stool that cannot balance or remain upright if one of the legs is removed, each of these three areas — water treatment, wastewater management and stormwater management — operate in concert with the other two to impact both water quantity or quality.

We in the Dalton metropolitan statistical area, which includes all of Whitfield and Murray counties, are dependent upon the Conasauga River for many reasons. It is our primary water source and, as the largest permitted water utility in Northwest Georgia, Dalton Utilities is charged with protecting and managing the issues that impact the Conasauga watershed.

Dalton Utilities, because of our numerous large industrial users, holds water withdrawal permits which exceed 67 million gallons per day. These permits make the utility the third largest water withdrawal permit holder in the state of Georgia exclusive of electrical generating power plant cooling water permits.

We operate three water treatment plants, the smallest being Freeman Springs which treats spring water in the west side of Whitfield County. Our second largest plant is the Mill Creek Treatment Plant which is located near the Crown Mill complex. Dalton Utilities’ oldest facility, the Mill Creek plant, was recently overhauled to meet new regulatory requirements and to discontinue the use of gaseous chlorine, a hazardous material. This plant utilizes modern membrane filtration technology and has improved water quality while reducing the amount of chemicals needed to properly treat the water. Our largest plant is the V.D. Parrott Jr. Treatment Plant, located in the Dawnville community along the Conasauga River. Because of new regulatory requirements, this plant will require a major overhaul in the next several years.

In addition to serving the city of Dalton, we provide drinking water and firefighting protection to every public road in Whitfield County and also provide service to portions of Murray and Catoosa counties. Additionally, we have interconnections to the Catoosa Utility District, Chatsworth Water Commission and Calhoun Utilities. Because the far northwestern portions of Whitfield County are in the Tennessee River Basin, we were able to obtain a purchase agreement with Eastside Utilities (Hamilton County, Tennessee) which allows us to purchase up to 3 million gallons per day from the Tennessee River.

In our wastewater business, we provide collection services throughout the city of Dalton and portions of Whitfield County, primarily serving the carpet industry. We have 43 permitted industrial users who are issued permits allowing them to discharge industrial wastewater to our system. We treat wastewater in three large diffused air treatment plants and two smaller regional plants. The smallest of these plants is our new Mill Creek plant located off Crow Valley Road. This new plant uses advanced membrane filtration, does not utilize gaseous chlorine and cleans the wastewater to a sufficient level to allow it to be directly discharged into Mill Creek. This new plant is designed such that its capacity is readily expandable and can provide treatment for the Westside of Whitfield County and Tunnel Hill.

The Abutment Plant, which is adjacent to the utility’s administrative offices, is next in size and discharges to our land application facility. We have two sister plants, a fine screen facility and a large equalization basin, all located at our land application system site, situated along the Conasauga River in both Whitfield and Murray counties.

The utility conducts wastewater treatment in the plants and discharges the treated wastewater to a large wastewater reservoir. Then, through a system of canals, pumps and piping, we distribute this treated wastewater across over 9,800 acres of forested land application system where the soil and plant matrix provide additional treatment. The water then returns through aquifer recharge and return flow to the Conasauga River. Our wastewater system also provides up to 13 million gallons each day of treated wastewater to the 1,240-megawatt combined cycle natural-gas fired electric generating plant located on our land application system to be utilized as cooling water.

Dalton Utilities is currently in the process of developing an algae-to-biofuel plant which will provide additional treatment to our wastewater, as well as producing biodiesel. Finally, the solids from our wastewater treatment process are dried using centrifuges and combined with wood waste products to form compost. From an environmental perspective, the issues addressed through these processes reuse our waste in many beneficial ways and are ahead of their time.

Our water and wastewater permits require that we manage stormwater and erosion control in the city of Dalton, and throughout the remainder of the watershed, we are required to oversee their management and report on these efforts. The management of these issues across the Conasauga watershed (which includes Dalton and great portions of Whitfield and Murray counties) is extremely critical to the long-term quality of our water supply.

The concepts associated with managing stormwater issues and our approach to them must by necessity change as our population and density increase. The issues associated with constructing new non-permeable structures — such as houses and other buildings, roads, sidewalks and parking lots — have significant impacts on water quality, flood control, erosion and maintenance of streambanks.

In the past, when our population density was much lower, our approach to stormwater management was simply to ensure water was routed to our streams whenever a new development was built. As our population and density have increased, the pollutants which enter our water supply from this type of development and the increase in volume and velocity of flow during storm events have resulted in flooding, property damage and water quality reduction. Recent rainfall events have greatly impacted our stormwater system and, historically, significant rain events have both inundated our wastewater collection system and significantly eroded our streambanks, damaging both private property and utility infrastructure. The proper planning, oversight and managing of these issues as we go forward is absolutely necessary to prevent a recurrence of these problems. We must manage stormwater in the same manner we do drinking water and wastewater treatment as they are all irrevocably tied together in our watershed.

As the population projections provided by the University of Georgia’s Carl Vinson Institute of Government to the Coosa-North Georgia Water Planning Council indicate, we are going to grow. In fact, it is predicted that Whitfield County will almost double in population, approaching 200,000 by the year 2050. Our watershed and the volume of water it can provide will not grow.

We have a responsibility to future generations to ensure that we manage our watershed in a way that leads to high-quality growth and protects our valuable natural resources in a way that allows future generations to benefit from them in the same manner as previous generations.



Don Cope is president and CEO of Dalton Utilities.