THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504300045
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ALEX MARSHALL, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
Moores Bridges is pretty charming for a water treatment plant, especially on a sunny spring day.
Construction workers munch sandwiches under the branches of a stout oak. Administrators walk into an ornate brick building with white neoclassical columns set beside budding magnolias.
But past this placid facade are huge sheets of metal emerging from the earth, I-beams scattered about, cranes, torn earth and all the other hubbub of heavy construction.
The work is part of an $82 million project to modernize and expand Moores Bridges, the city's principal water treatment plant off Northampton Boulevard. It turns dirty lake water into clean drinking water for a half-million people in Norfolk and Virginia Beach.
It's not the city's only treatment facility; there's also one at Lamberts Point. But Moores Bridges is the largest, and renovating it will cost the biggest chunk of the $250 million Norfolk is spending over five years to fix and enlarge its water treatment facilities.
That's roughly five times the cost of Nauticus, the theme park/museum on the Elizabeth River.
The expensive renovation, with a 1998 completion date, is necessary for two reasons, say city officials. One is to meet new federal health and environmental standards. The second is to treat the additional millions of gallons of water Virginia Beach expects to come daily to the plant from Lake Gaston.
On Friday, Virginia Beach finally gave the go-ahead for Norfolk to begin parts of the expansion. The city had held off until Virginia Beach reached an historic agreement with North Carolina that clears the way for the Lake Gaston pipeline.
Virginia Beach has committed to paying just over $100 million for the modernization of Norfolk's facilities. Overall, it's a good deal for both cities, said Louis L. Guy Jr., Norfolk's director of public utilities. Norfolk would have to do much of the work anyway, so Virginia Beach's participation helps soften the blow.
``Norfolk's water rates would go up twice as much without Virginia Beach,'' Guy said. ``It's cheaper for Virginia Beach, and it's cheaper for Norfolk.''
The Moores Bridges complex dates to the 1870s, which accounts for its sultry charm. The first building, two stories of brick with fancy trim, was finished in 1899. It still holds filtration tanks, as it did in 1899. Originally, they were wood. Now they are concrete and steel.
In the 19th century, the site was far out in farm country. Now, it sits hidden behind a bend in the road from the bustle of I-64, Northampton Boulevard and Lake Taylor High School.
Over the decades, the city has regularly expanded the treatment facilities to meet the region's growing needs. Each major part of the complex dates to a different era. The main brick pumping house, for example, was built in 1945.
The basic water treatment process is this: Pipes from lakes the city owns in Suffolk, and pipes from several in-town lakes, carry water to the plant, where it is first blended with chlorine, powdered activated carbon and aluminum sulfate.
The mixture kills bacteria and binds with impurities so they can be removed.
Afterward, the water is gently mixed, allowed to sit for an hour, and then filtered through beds of sand and charcoal. The filtration process produces a mixture of sediment composed of chemicals and dirt. This mixture, called sludge, is pumped away for disposal.
The pure water left after filtration is pumped to giant, cylindrical holding tanks. Fluoride, lime to adjust the water's acidity, and a little more chlorine is added to the water. Then it is goes to pumping stations, which send it to shower heads and garden hoses across Norfolk and Virginia Beach.
The city has to refine this process to meet several new federal standards.
The Drinking Water Act requires the city to further reduce the number of impurities, measured in parts per billion, found in water after purification.
The Clean Water Act concerns itself with the purity of the cleaning process itself. No longer can the city simply pump the sludge left from the purification process into Broad Creek. Now it must extract the water until it resembles cakes of black dirt, which are then trucked to a landfill.
The modernization process the city has devised to meet these federal standards doesn't change the treatment procedure dramatically, it simply refines it. New sedimentation tanks filter the water more quickly and more cleanly. A new 8 million gallon water tank will allow more water to be stored, so the treatment facility can operate at an even speed regardless of water usage. A new series of holding tanks and pipes will make it possible to extract more of the added chemicals in the filtration process.
There are 150 construction workers working on the project - three times the size of the regular city staff there. In coming months, another 100 construction workers will be added.
There won't be any special systems set up to separately handle Virginia Beach's Lake Gaston water separately. The new process will be more efficient, as well as more thorough, at treating the water and will be designed to handle the extra flow. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
BILL TIERNAN/Staff
Phillip Askew and Clen Bourgon do renovation work on a filtration
tank at Moores Bridges, Norfolk's principal water treatment plant.
by CNB