concerto in mildew

hmmmm. the distinctly musty, and not especially grand spencer hotel in wilmington delaware. why am i here, in this not-nice-smelling room? for a meeting, tomorrow, first with the folks around the corner at malcon pirnie and then all of us, driving down to dover, to meet with dnrec, about juat what it is that new castle county can do, in the future, with the wastewater generated by its future residents. so many options, and yet so many competing pollution control stratgeies. apparently the best solution is for future new castle county residents to live elsewhere.

and before coming here, instead of preparing for tomorrow's meeting, spending some two and a half hours in a conference call with epa hq and coe on the nola “unwatering” as it was infelicitously termed by some (the engineers in the crowd still preferred “dewatering”). received an interesting update from the ground, things are ahead of schedule, currently going at about 12,000 cfs. 60 Hz motors are going; 25 Hz are not. this high rate part is going rather quickly so time is of the essence if any treatment is going to be implemented. booms are either in place or on the way; aerators are next. tried to get hold of a corps guy to answer his question of how many, and where; couldn’t return calls. it looks like people are most concerned about keeping oil out of the marshes; there have already been times when pumps were shut down because big blobs of oil were approaching the intakes. in the longer term there is also sensitivity in keeping major nastiness away from oyster beds. i listened to a lot of discussion about what could be monitored in real time, although it wasn’t clear how that information could actually be used for decision-making. when you are moving 12,000 cfs impacts can occur quite swiftly, and to significant extents.

i think the big issue will be how to provide treatment to the “bottoms” as they are delicately called. there is some likelihood that, by the time we get to that point, it will be possible to convey at least some, and maybe a lot, of that stuff via the sanitary collection system, to the existing treatment plants. there won’t of course be biological treatment yet, but primary and disinfection will be a lot easier to manage, at least giving it a lick and a promise. plus the actual treatment rates may be low enough to make skid-mounted high-rate physical/chemical processes feasible, really take some metals out. we shall see. i'm not going to be headed there, but i will be able to keep track of things.

what is kind of crazy to think about is that, in a couple of weeks, things are probably going to be slow again. of course, maybe that means i can get back over to the velodrome...