How Water Treatment Plants Work
Water treatment is critical to the health and safety of your community, and as recent events have shown, having poor quality water or water that is not properly treated at a water treatment facility can have detrimental health consequences on the population. In order to provide good quality water to your constituents, it’s important to have a water treatment plant that is working properly.
Water System Sizes
The drinking water standards that a treatment facility must meet are different depending on the size of the facility and the number of people it serves. Generally they fall into one of three different categories:
Community Water System – with 54,000 of these in the U.S., they are the second largest type behind transient non-community water systems. These are public water systems that serve a fixed group of people all year-round. Generally that includes things like homes, apartments, condos, and mobile home parks in small communities.
Non-Community Water System – this type of system is also public but serves different people throughout the year. They fall into two types:
Treatment Processes
Different water suppliers use a variety of treatment processes that can remove harmful contaminants from water that is provided to communities for drinking purposes. In some cases several individual treatment processes will be conducted sequentially to ensure the highest level of safety for the water that leaves the plant.
The Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974-2004 protects the public’s health when it comes to water from the tap using treatment methods that might include:
The exact processes that each water treatment plant chooses, and the sequence in which they are applied, is based on the contaminants contained in the raw water that comes through the system.
You can find all the water treatment plant equipment you need for your own processes at Ashton Tucker.