Friends -
My local water authority has said my sewage lagoons are ‘septic’ and need to be remediated. Pumping them out is an (expensive) option. Has anyone dealt with such situations? Are there chemicals to add (or yeast…?) to fix the water?
Many thanks,
-jl-
Jefferson, I would advise you consult a local civil engineer. There are several possible remedies depending on the specifics of your system. One newer method that I have been seeing implemented here on old systems that were designed with too small a surface area to meet newer effluent limits is to install chlorinators at the discharge.
But before spending any money, you should check your facility and make sure it has no shade or that any rainwater runoff is reaching the system, next look to see when the health dept. collected the sample and determine if any unusual event were occuring then. If you can obtain past records to see what the baseline effluent discharge has historically been, you will have a better idea going forward what can be achieved.
Here is a website that may have links to resources for Oklahoma www.moruralwater.org
It has been twenty five years since I worked in municipal wastewater treatment. But “septic” usually means excessively anaerobic. There are microbes which prefer aerobic environments and those that prefer anaerobic environments. I only worked briefly with a smaller town that had lagoons. It seems occasionally they would have to aerate their lagoons to rebalance them.
Because these are public utilities you may want to ask your water authority if any of the public systems have a lagoon. Go talk to them at length. The shift supervisors will know as much as the environmental engineer about hands-on issues.
I can’t remember if your park is near a college, Jefferson. If they have an environmental engineering or enviro tech dept. they may be helpful. If all else fails, seek help from a wastewater engineering co.
Maybe I should have finished that environmental engineering program I was in while trying to work backward rotating shifts at the treatment plant.
Steve