2021-11-24 EMC draft minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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ii. Pretreatment Administrative Order on Consent introduction and status Director Mansour said the pretreatment AOC has been signed and is in the final approval stages with the Department of Health. So we have a two-year window to implement this. It is going to impact our businesses around the island, from dentist clinics to restaurants to industrial and commercial entities. The idea is we need to monitor what these businesses are disposing into the wastewater system prior to just letting it flow within our sewer system. So, wastewater needs to be pretreated before it flows into the treatment plant. We need to implement that. Were going to submit for additional staffing and additional budget items for this year just to support that program as we move forward. Chair Adams said her understanding of pretreatment standards is that we should have a need to make sure that there arent any commercial operations that are going to knock out the bugs we have in our current wastewater treatment systems. So, if somebody is putting slugs of heavy metals, or acid, or too many nutrients that overwhelm our systems, they are going to need to do some treatment at the site before they let it go down the drain to our treatment works. She does not know that we have on this island significant issues around that. We dont have heavy industry here. So, it may not be the end of the world, but it takes working through it all and understanding what weve got and whether or not our wastewater treatment plants can handle the stuff theyre getting. Thats assuming we have working wastewater treatment plants at all. Director Mansour agreed. Any discharge to our facility, if its toxic, will become toxic to our friendly bugs that could do the treatment at the plant. Were going to keep them healthy. We are going to keep them active, and any substance such as dental mercury going into the system could impact our treatment. High metals and high acids could change the bugs behavior. Fats, oils, and grease (FOG) from restaurants will impact and create a maintenance nightmare into the sewer system. All of that is part of that pretreatment program. The AOC has timelines, and within two to three years it should be implemented County-wide. And this is standard stuff elsewhere, Chair Adams said. The technologies to do pretreatment exist. The problems are well known. This law was in existence in the late 1980s, so we were supposed to be in compliance 30 years ago, Director Mansour said. It is also tied to the amount of flow that wastewater treatment generates. The threshold was 5 million gallons per day. So if its a county or city or that reduces 5 million more gallon per day of wastewater, they have to implement that pretreatment program. So County-wide here we exceeded the 5 MGD flow for many years, but now we are catching up. 21