Water plant on brink of completion

Construction of Clinton’s new water treatment plant should be completed by the Aug. 9 deadline Wynn Construction Co. of Oklahoma City was given 15 months ago when it was awarded a $14.6-million contract to build the plant, consultant Lonnie Teel indicated Thursday.
Even so, the plant won’t be producing water for another 90 days or so, said Teel, after Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality tests are completed.
Currently, the plant is going through a “commissioning stage,” which he defined as a period when everything is tested and fine-tuned. When it’s complete, he said the plant should be capable of producing water of a quality equivalent to or better than bottled water bought at the grocery store.
Clinton Lake water has long been touted as the city’s best, but Teel said water from the new plant will be even better. That’s because it will have a “reverse osmosis” treatment system.
“The water will be purified,” said Teel. “The difference is Clinton Lake has a ‘filtration’ plant. You’re basically cleaning the water up in the lake through filtration, whereas this process actually purifies the water. It’s past filtration.”
Asked about the water passersby are currently seeing flowing down bar ditches near the new plant, Teel said, “We’re flushing our systems right now. It’s well water. We have to fill the plant up with raw water, flush all the systems, clean and chlorinate them. DEQ also has to come in physically, inspect everything and give us authority to run the plant. We don’t know what that time frame is yet.”
Teel had more to say about the water running down the ditch, not wanting people to worry about it. He said during the construction process dirt and trash get in the lines as they’re put together, so they have to be pressured up and flushed.
“It’s all good clean water,” he said. “It’s well water and just part of the process. We also have a 500,000-gallon holding tank. We have to fill it and drain it, so the water going down the ditch is just plain water. We’re flushing the system.”
The new plant will have an approximate 3-million-gallons-per-day treatment capacity, although it initially won’t produce near that much since the city has other water that it’s contracted to buy from other sources. For example, it’s committed to buying almost half the water produced at Foss Reservoir, at a cost of about $80,000 per month, even though none of it has been used since last November.
Initially, the water treated at the new plant will come from two sources – a well west of town on land owned by Johnnie Dixon and one or two wells at Riverside Golf Course. All three of those wells were drilled after the city initiated its $29.5-million water improvement program. Of course the program was initiated and approved by voters when the city was in the throes of a five-year drought that ended in 2015.
Teel confirmed Thursday that all lines are in place to carry water from those wells to the new plant. So are lines that will take waste removed during the treatment process from the plant to city sewer lines. Those lines will take it to the waste-water plant where it will be processed and cleaned just like other sewage before eventually being deposited into the Washita River and sent on downstream.