I would like to thank Post reporter Alex Stuckey for her attendance at the recent City Council street and utility tour. It was a long, chilly and (some would say) boring day, but she stuck it out in order to report the news about city infrastructure to the student population.
I need to clarify several aspects of your May 3rd article titled, Upgrades target toxic chlorine tank. It is true that a total release from the one-ton chlorine tank at the wastewater treatment plant could hurt a lot of people in the Athens area, but the article presented this as a bit more dramatic than it really is. Chlorine is used for disinfection regularly everywhere in the United States in water and wastewater treatment, as well as many other fields. The safeguards in place at the Athens plants make a release highly unlikely, and there are a number of security measures in place to prevent tampering. Residents should not be concerned.
A couple of other points of clarification from the article: 1) Ultra-violet disinfection will not necessarily be more energy-efficient because it uses electricity (though we won't be buying chlorine). 2) Chlorine is removed from the effluent before discharge to the river using sulfur dioxide, not ammonia. 3) Chlorine as the final step does not remove phosphorous and nitrogen; it removes bacteria. 4) Lastly, we don't send discharge samples to the EPA every month; we sample and test the discharge ourselves at the city laboratory and send the results to the EPA.
Sewage treatment is a complex and tedious topic that most people have exactly zero interest in. I applaud Ms. Stuckey for her efforts to make it interesting to your readers, and will continue to work with her on any infrastructure matters she wants to write about. I just felt it was important to clarify the points noted above.
Andy Stone is director of Engineering and Public Works for Athens.
4 Opinion
Letter to the Editor
