(WSB photos and video)
With another “atmospheric river” on the way, the King County Wastewater Treatment Division‘s Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station is gearing up for another potentially busy run of intercepting contaminated runoff/overflow water before it gets to the Duwamish River. This is the year-old facility you may have driven or rode past many times, near the north end of the 1st Avenue South Bridge, on the northwest corner of 4th and Michigan. Today the county gave media crews a behind-the-scenes tour.
Operating the quarter-billion-dollar facility – built over more than four years – is not labor-intensive – just one person is needed at all times to run it, and if there’s a major storm event sending millions of gallons of water through it, that rises to a grand total of three. It can handle up to 70 million gallons of combined-sewer overflow per day. (So far its peak usage has been 26 million gallons a day during an early December storm.)
Unlike the county’s Murray Wet Weather Facility by Lowman Beach, and the West Duwamish Wet Weather Storage Facility that’ll be built on our side of the 1st Avenue South Bridge, the Georgetown facility is a treatment plant – taking solids out of the water via a “high-speed settling tank” using materials like the sand in these bags to quickly pull the solids out of the water:
The solids eventually wind up in agricultural use. The filtered water gets disinfected with ultraviolet light:
After all that, the treated water gets sent into the Duwamish River, via an outfall under the nearby bridge.
King County Executive Dow Constantine gave the overview of the plant, noting it’s won awards and is intended for climate resiliency, including the fact it was built to handle up to two feet of sea-level rise:
(added) Rebecca Singer, who oversees facilities including this one, said this rainy season is the real test for the treatment station:
The facility also has interpretive features and gets visits from students.
The county has been working on combined-sewer-overflow reduction for more than a decade under orders from the federal government to reduce the overflows into local waterways. The consent decree related to this gave a deadline of 2030 to meet the goals; we asked Wastewater Treatment Division spokesperson Alison Hawkes how much progress the county has made: “We built the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station as one of our commitments in the consent decree. We have controlled a number of outfalls already, and are working to meet requirements on others. Some of the details on this future work, such as the timeline, are in negotiations with EPA and [state] Ecology as part of our request for modification of the consent decree – that information will be released to the public once negotiations are finalized.”
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