CdA wastewater superintendent tells it like it is
Sid Frederickson, wastewater superintendent for the city of Coeur d’Alene, is sometimes asked in social situations what he does for a living. The man who oversees the city’s wastewater treatment plant replies that he is “chief of the lumpy water department.” He also describes himself as a “turd herder.”
Fredrickson not only has a good sense of humor, he possesses the knack of explaining complex wastewater issues in ways the rest of us can understand.
Fredrickson, 60, has been involved for almost a year in the Spokane River TMDL. Collaboration, a Washington state Department of Ecology process to implement the best water quality cleanup plan for the river. The collaboration process has been a unique one, as regulators, dischargers and environmentalists meet to discuss the future of the river. Today, Fredrickson shares with editorial board member Rebecca Nappi his no-nonsense views on the river and the treated wastewater his treatment plant discharges into it.
Before our formal interview, he gave us a short primer on the plant, followed by an extensive tour.
Q: What will we see on our tour today?
A: What comes into a municipal plant is typically 99.95 percent water. Only 0.05 percent solids. So what you’ll see today is about, counting the new construction, is about a $60 million investment to remove as much of that 0.05 percent solids that we can. We remove those solids in two ways. We do it through primary treatment, which is gravity, and we do it through secondary treatment, which is biology. As we remove the solids, we send the solids to a different place. We take that solid stream and we send them for processing through a different building. The liquid goes along to a different building. We will follow the liquid stream and then we’ll follow the solid stream.
What you’re seeing today is the construction that will expand the plant’s capacity and it will replace some old 1939 structures that are just too old, beyond their life. We will cover what we call our primary clarifiers. We’ll use fancy covers for order control, for aesthetics. We’re going to have an educational corridor around here and we don’t want to look like a tank farm.
And the third reason is for a thing called vector reduction. What is a vector? Any creature that can spread disease — insects, rodents and birds. So by covering these we will get rid of our seagulls and our crows that are feeding on raw sewage and then flying away and potentially spreading disease. Those are the main big things in the expansion. We’ll be adding some other things for solids processing to make it more efficient. But we’re not adding any advanced treatment processes at this time. That will come in subsequent phases. Not sure just when we’re going to do that. Not sure what it will look like. That’s all part of the TMDL process.
Q: This plant was built in 1939. Explain what Coeur d’Alene might have looked like then.
A: There was less than 10,000 people here. The first sewers went in in 1906. So between 1906 and 1939, there was no sewage treatment. Raw sewage was dumped directly into the river and into the lake. Starting in 1939, at the completion of this plant, we had secondary treatment. It was a much higher level of treatment, at least 80 to 90 percent removal of the organics. That was very uncommon. In fact it was not a requirement until Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1972. When the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland Ohio caught fire in 1969, for the third time, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back with regard to Congress and that led to the passage of the Clean Water Act which mandated secondary treatment for municipalities and industry. So since that time all the municipal and industrial treatment plants have come up to at least that level.
Q: Why was Coeur d’Alene so head of the curve?
A: We don’t know. When I go back and research the council minutes from that time, the record is totally quiet as to why that decision was made. Why did we spend $145,500 to build a secondary treatment plant. Don’t know.
Q: How many gallons of wastewater a day go through this plant?
A: We’re currently flowing at somewhere around 3.3 million gallons per day. That sounds like a lot. But how does it compare to other treatment plants? Spokane — close to 40 million gallons a day. Most of the large metro areas have multiple treatment plants, most of those are in the 250-300 million gallons a day. Largest single plant I’m aware of serves the Detroit metro area and that’s in excess of a billion gallons a day. So we’re pretty small compared to the big boys.
Q: Is it just the city of Coeur d’Alene?
A: Just the city of Coeur d’Alene and Fernan Village.
Q: And how many employees?
A: We have 21 that work for the wastewater utility department.
Q: What’s the exact name of your treatment plant?
A: We call it the city of Coeur d’Alene’s Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant.
Q: The first-phase expansion going on right now, when was it approved by the voters?
A: It didn’t have to be approved by the voters. It was funded out of revenue bonds. In Idaho what we can do is we go to a bond election or a district judge and say, “Judge, these are ordinary and necessary expenses.” There is a legal case law example of what that means — and if he agrees, we are at liberty to go ahead and enter into indebtedness to pay for that. Most of these are mandated improvements. The next phases, for advanced treatment processes, for phosphorous removal, we’re not sure what those are going to look like yet.
Q: When was it started and when will it be completed?
A: This particular contract was started in May 2005 and we anticipate it will be complete toward the end of 2006.
Q: Is the purpose more capacity?
A: It’s more for capacity than anything else. It’s not adding any additional advanced treatment processes at this time. We’ll be able to go to from 3.3 million gallons to 6 million gallons. That’s our threshold for the 20-year horizon. That’s not build out.
Q: How clean is the wastewater that goes into the river from this plant?
A: Very. There’s a whole host of different parameters used to measure the effectiveness of treatment, but we’re doing at least 95 percent removal of the organics and the oxygen-demanding substances. We’re obligated by EPA to do 85 percent.
Q: Tell me how long you have been at the plant.
A: I came over with the wastewater department in May of 1991.
Q: How long have you been with the city of Coeur d’Alene?
A: Since November 1986.
Q: Tell me where you were born and raised.
A: All over the mountain West in terms of being raised. I was born in Northern Utah, but I really call Western Montana home. That’s where I spent high school and college, in Dillon, Mont. And then I spent about 15 years in Flathead.
Q: How did you get to Coeur d’Alene?
A: Job opening with the city of Coeur d’Alene with the street department.
Q: What year was that?
A: 1986.
Q: When you’re at a party or a social gathering and people don’t know what you do for a living, how do you explain your job?
A: Flippantly. Basically, I will introduce myself as the chief of the lumpy water department. That will at least get their interest so we can discuss what I really do.
Q: What is the biggest misconception about wastewater management by people you meet?
A: That we have one interest and one interest only and that is to be able to figure out a way to put more pollutants into the river.
Q: How do you dissuade them of that viewpoint?
A: Sometimes successfully, sometimes not. We used to be members of a professional organization known as the Water Pollution Control Federation, which is now simply the Water Environment Federation. That was a consortium of utilities, academics, engineers that came together with the whole idea that we are a pollution control organization. Our job is to control pollution.
Q: How do you that?
A: We do that by tremendous investment on behalf of the ratepayer. More advanced process, optimizing what we do have, getting it to run better than it needs to run.
Q: How many gallons of treated wastewater a day go into the Spokane River from this plant?
A: About 3.3 million gallons per day. That’s pretty small.
Q: What is the wastewater’s relationship to the river?
A: Because of the interaction between the aquifer and the river, you’ve got two choices. You can swim in it or drink it. It’s our contention that we’re better off environmentally, even if we have to go to higher levels of treatment, to at least part of the year dispose of in the river.
Q: What would happen if we took all the wastewater out of the river?
A: You’d have a detrimental effect downstream because you’d have less water flows in the river. So that’s something that needs to be looked at very carefully.
Q: Talk about the detrimental effects of lower flows.
A: Lower flows end up producing higher temperatures in the river which will have detrimental effects on the fishery.
Q: You’re a no-nonsense guy. Is there a part of the river cleanup plan discussion going on now that makes you a little crazy?
A: The thing that is more disturbing than anything is that under the initial proposal, it was to have the point source dischargers, i.e. the wastewater treatment plants, be responsible for the entire cleanup effort. There was no real look or strategy for developing a nonpoint source control program. Nonpoint sources being those not related to the end of pipe — tributaries, the aquifer, whatever agricultural runoff there may be.
Q: How has that changed?
A: In the proposal that the dischargers have submitted to Washington state’s Department of Ecology, we are willing to commit to putting in a significant contribution to a nonpoint source control fund. So that we would look at ways we could eliminate, or at least decrease, the nonpoint source contribution.
Q: The river cleanup plan, the so-called TMDL process, tell me what you’ve nicknamed it.
A: An attorney told me this: TMDL stands for too many damn lawyers.
Q: Idaho was around the table, even though it’s a Washington Department of Ecology TMDL process. Why were you there?
A: There was a 1992 court case involving Arkansas and Oklahoma in which the Supreme Court said yes, the downstream state does have the legal authority and right to control the water quality standards of the upstream state as it enters that downstream state. So whatever ecology does definitely will have an impact across the line.
Q: Let’s shift gears and talk about you and rivers. When did you first get to know the Spokane River and in what way do you know it?
A: My first exposure to it was through boating on the river. Then in 1991, when I became wastewater superintendent our offices were located right on the banks of the Spokane River. So for the next 11 or 12 years, daily, I was watching the river and the river environment.
Q: Are you a fisherman?
A: Yes.
Q: Where do you fish?
A: Not the Spokane River. I primarily fly fish, so I fly fish in the Coeur d’Alene and the St. Joe.
Q: Looking at the river each year for those 11 years, has that made it harder to reconcile putting treated wastewater into it?
A: I guess I’ve never had a problem reconciling it at all. Over that period of time, we’ve been watching and monitoring water quality in the river both above and below our discharge and we’ve not seen any measurable effect of our discharge.
Q: What is going on at the plant right now in terms of construction?
A: We’re expanding the capability for capacity. We’re replacing an original 1939 headworks structure which is where the raw sewage pumping station is. We’re replacing that with a larger one that will have a higher capacity but it will also have more modern equipment and it will be easier for the staff to maintain equipment.
Q: What will the capacity increase to?
A: It will have an instantaneous hydraulic capacity of about 19 million gallons a day. Our current one is 13 million gallons a day and we have hit that during heavy storm events.
Q: In the future, after this phase, do you anticipate going to even more sophisticated treatment?
A: Absolutely. I don’t think anyone can argue with the need to do more to protect water quality in the Spokane River and in Lake Spokane. We may be arguing over how low a number we’re going to have to try to attain, but I don’t think anybody can argue that we’ll have to go to more advanced treatment.
Q: What would that advanced treatment do?
A: It would remove phosphorous to a much lower level. Phosphorous is very much linked to dissolved oxygen issues because of algae production.
Q: What technology is available to do that?
A: There’s some micro filtration technologies available. There are some specialized sand filter technologies available including one being piloted at a full-scale basis at Hayden called blue water. We’ve piloted that process here. We’ll be piloting these other technologies to see which ones would fit best with our plant.
Q: When do you anticipate having to go to that super-advanced treatment?
A: Certainly within the next five years.
Q: There might be some people who wonder if people in wastewater can actually love a river. Can you be putting treated sewage into a river and still love it?
A: I don’t see why not. We’ll be producing an effluent of extremely high quality. Idaho does not have the reuse capability that Washington apparently does in regard to land application over the aquifer. First of all, the land does not exist and Idaho’s standard is not to allow any moisture to leave the root zone to head toward the aquifer. So that greatly limits when you can apply and how much you can apply. So we may have to go to higher and higher levels of treatment. But for disposal options, I don’t see any other option, period, than at least partial discharge into the river.
Q: Coeur d’Alene is very trendy now. You’re getting a lot of people moving here from bigger places. If you had a bunch of newcomers in a classroom, how would you explain how wastewater is part of their responsibility as newcomers?
A: It’s not easy. It’s something we’ve been working on in terms of public education and research outreach. We’ll be doing it more and more in the next few years. You look at the possibility of doubling or tripling monthly rates, it’s certainly going to have an impact on everybody in the community — some more than others. But if we are going to be good stewards of the environment, I don’t think we have much choice.
Q: It’s not a topic people really want to talk about long, correct?
A: No, they don’t seem to. That’s going to be the challenge. That’s where we’ll see how well we’re going to do collectively as a group, myself and the other utilities and the elected officials. It will be a tough sell. But it’s also necessary.
Q: Talk some more about people’s viewpoints about wastewater. Why are people in denial about it?
A: I wish I could answer that with a couple of sound bites. I don’t know. If my drinking water is threatened, or if your drinking water is threatened, you’re going to be up in arms immediately. If we are going to maintain the health of our water environment, we are going to have to have advanced technologies in wastewater and people will have to pay for that. There is no free lunch.
When I first started in this game 30 years ago, there was oodles and gobs of free federal money for wastewater treatment. Those days are over. It’s going to be on the backs of the ratepayer. As a utility manager, I am going to choose the best bang for the buck, the most cost-effective treatment technology that will do the job that’s needed. And hopefully we can educate our ratepayers to realize that’s just the cost of doing the business in the mountain West.
Q: Does the denial stem from the nature of what goes on here?
A: I think it does. You want clean drinking water but you don’t want to worry about where your garbage goes. You don’t want to worry about where it goes when you hit the flush valve on your toilet. But it goes somewhere and it has impacts and we as a responsible society are going to have to be ready to pay for that.
Q: Why is it expensive?
A: We don’t do anything cheap in the wastewater business. The technologies are very spendy. We have over 110 pumps in this treatment plant alone. The cost for power, the cost for chemicals, the cost for replacement equipment items are all extremity expensive. There’s a lot more involved here than there is furnishing safe drinking water. We’re blessed. We have a sole source aquifer. You are only limited by the size of the straw that you put into the ground. We all know that’s not true. There’s a finite limit there. But there’s very little treatment that has to go on beyond pulling it out of the aquifer and putting it in the distribution system. There’s the big difference between water and wastewater.
Q: Is it hard to educate people that what happens up here in Coeur d’Alene influences Lake Spokane? How do you make that connection for people?
A: That’s probably the biggest challenge. People up here will say, ‘I don’t care what the problem is in Washington. That’s Washington’s problem.’ Well, no it isn’t. We’re the upstream state. We have a moral, ethical and legal responsibility to meet Washington’s water quality standards at the state line. We can argue whether those standards are appropriate or not, but we’re not going to argue about the need to meet it.
Q: If you could cut through all the rhetoric and all the red tape to solve the problem, what would you do? And pretend money is no object.
A: There is part of the Clean Water Act that allows the preparation of a Use Attainability Analysis. That means you set a water quality standard that will be protective of not only the existing uses, but the attainable beneficial uses in that water body. What are those beneficial uses? Well, generally the most sensitive is the fisheries. In fact EPA guidance strongly suggests that this Use Attainability Analysis be prepared before the preparation of a TMDL. It allows you to set a water quality standard that fits that water body rather than one size fits all.
Does that means it gets us out of advanced treatment? It doesn’t mean that at all. It just means setting a standard that’s appropriate. Now we might not like what comes out of that analysis. It may be as stringent as what’s on the books now or it may be less stringent. But it makes sense from a scientific standpoint.
Q: What would a Use Attainability Analysis look like on this river?
A: You’re going to take all the biological studies that have been done to date and you are going to look at those. And if there are data gaps in those studies, and Lord knows Avista has done a lot of that work, then if money is no object I am going to go out and I’m going to fill those data gaps. I’m going to collect whatever information I need to know so that I can do a good, objective analysis.
Q: Is this a river we’d need to relax about salmon?
A: I don’t think there’s much evidence of salmon in there. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t in the past. Certainly the salmonid species — trout and whitefish — you’ve got to look at those. They are in the river. You’ve got to set a standard that is protective of those species during critical habitat months, such as spawning. What we don’t have is all the parties willing to say yes, we do need to sit down and write a Use Attainability Analysis. What’s being proposed in the TMDL collaboration is let’s go to the next level of treatment and then some point in the future we’ll come back and revisit our goals and standards and see if it makes sense to do a Use Attainability Analysis. And that’s fine. I don’t have any problem with that, because I don’t think anyone can legitimately argue that more advanced treatment is not necessary.
Q: Around the TMDL Collaboration table, you strike me as one of the truth-tellers around that table. You and Spokane Deputy Mayor Jack Lynch. Now you’re both Montanans. It might have something to do with that. How comfortable do you feel being that truth-teller.
A: Pretty comfortable. Yes, I’m a utility manager. But first and foremost I consider myself as a scientist. Having been an1 educator, I like to bring the complex science in terms that the lay person can grasp.
Q: Tell us about your education.
A: I received a bachelor of science in secondary education with chemistry major, physical science major and math minor from what’s now the University of Montana Western at Dillon, Mont. Taught public schools for three years, fell in love with the engineering field and the rest is history. I spent a short stint with the city of Whitefish, Mont., and prior to that I worked for a consulting engineering firm in Kalispell, Mont. Starting in 1973 up through my leaving the firm in 1983, our bread and butter was wastewater treatment plants.
Q: Is there one thing you said around that TMDL table you are proud of? Or something you pointed out?
A: I am so much more optimistic that we are going to reach a collaborative consensus today than I was six months ago, it’s unbelievable. All of us around that table have shifted our own individual paradigms and perspectives considerably.
Q: Was the Use Attainability Analysis your drumbeat?
A: We did that as a group of dischargers and we did that early on. It was also pointed out to us pretty clearly that ecology didn’t feel like we had addressed all of their concerns and we had a document that would be viable. Toward the end of February, they said if you will voluntarily withdraw your petition, we will sit at the table with you and see if we can reach an accord. That was pretty good news.
Q: Where did your paradigm shift occur?
A: My feelings initially were that when all is said and done, nothing will change at all. There will be no movement on anybody’s part. And when we get done yelling at each other for six months, we’re going to be right where we started.
Q: How optimistic are you that there will be a cleanup plan within six months?
A: Ninety-something percent.
Q: How important is community outreach? How important is to get them in here to look at the process?
A: Extremely important. In 2006, we’re going to do a major facility plan amendment. We’re going to look at our roadmap that we thought we knew and we’re going to revisit that. Now with the TMDL and a higher level of treatment required, that will change our roadmap. That’s also going to change our funding required. It’s not going to get cheaper. I’ve never seen anything get cheaper. So to bring our elected officials, as well as our ratepayers along on that path, it will be important that John Q. Citizen understand what we are doing.
I’m asked occasionally why don’t you just move the treatment plant? OK, I’ll be happy to. Got a $100 million in your back pocket? And what do I gain if I move it? Where do I move it? Out on the prairie? Land disposal is not an option for us. It takes too many acres of land. Can we do some land disposal? Yes, we can. But we’ll still end up having to put the bulk of the discharge back into the river.
Q: How about tours?
A: Be happy to do tours. It’s one of the things that is part of our high school curriculum for chemistry. We are getting the high school students to come through the plant. We don’t like the real little kids coming through. This is an industrial site, after all. But we will make arrangements and take people on tours.
Q: Is there an average price that a citizen pays here for wastewater services?
A: Single family residential rates are just a little over $23 a month.
Q: What will that have to go up to eventually?
A: How good is your crystal ball? Mine’s pretty cloudy.
Q: Give me a range.
A: It could double in the next decade. I would hope it wouldn’t, but it’s conceivable, depending on what technologies we go to.
Q: Five years from now, will this treatment plant and others still be discharging into the river?
A: Yes.
Q: Twenty?
A: Yes.
Q: When will it stop, if ever?
A: When we stop building people.