Maintenance that began on the Homer Wastewater Treatment Plant earlier this summer will be concluding this week, with the plant returning to full operation for the remainder of Homer’s busiest season.

Plant operators and hired contractors have been working to upgrade multiple pieces of equipment, including a clarifier, a digestor and a blower, the latter two of which are part of the same process in the treatment system, superintendent Todd Cook told Homer News in a July 25 interview. A clarifier removes solid particulates or suspended solids from liquid for clarification. Blowers provide aeration and promote aerobic digestion of particulates, vital to the microorganisms that work in the system and to overall process of wastewater treatment.

The equipment being replaced is more than 30 years old, original to the plant when it first went online in 1990, according to Cook. The maintenance projects were meant to be conducted prior to the start of Homer’s peak tourist season, but due to supply chain issues and scheduling contractors, that wasn’t feasible.

The plant has been running at about half capacity since early June, when the first clarifier was taken offline for contracted crews to begin maintenance. The plant operators did a large part of the work on the aeration equipment, though a technician from the manufacturing company was scheduled to visit the plant on Tuesday and conduct the preliminary start up to make sure everything is running smoothly.

“We were doing a lot of that work in-house,” Cook said. “There’s a lot of fabrication that had to be done, and we pulled some of the equipment offline so we could make room for the new equipment, and then started getting ready to fab it up and get all the parts and pieces together.”

Plant operators, highly trained and certified, generally conduct all of the maintenance in the facility. But due to the scale and time demand of these specific projects, as well as to mitigate cost and liability, contractors were hired to repair the clarifiers and to conduct the start-up process for the digester blowers.

The plant has installed two new blowers, one of which can do the work of three of the original units, Cook said. The plant will run one blower at a time, with the other available as a redundancy. The new units will also increase efficiency and noise control and decrease energy consumption, according to Cook.

For more information, visit https://www.cityofhomer-ak.gov/citymanager/maintenance-underway-wastewater-treatment-plant.

Superintendent Todd Cook explains the capabilities of the newly-installed blowers compared to the old units at the Homer Sewer Treatment Plant on Thursday, July 27, 2023 in Homer, Alaska. (Delcenia Cosman/Homer News)