Siemens Water Technologies has supplied a wide variety of water treatment technologies, equipment and services to ARRA-funded municipal projects in the past year. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 provided stimulus funds to some municipalities in need of upgrades or expansions to existing plants, or those needing to address water scarcity concerns by implementing water reuse projects. To meet those needs, Siemens has helped customers upgrade existing equipment to reduce costs, better manage water resources, comply with new regulations and save energy. Siemens has also provided sustainable solutions to combat dwindling water supplies in the most cost effective way possible.

Some of the solutions Siemens provided involved retrofits to replace aging infrastructure, additional treatment equipment to meet the demands of increasing populations, or reuse systems to remedy water scarcity issues. These projects spanned the U.S. from Washington to New York and included a wide range of technologies, from clarifiers to reverse osmosis to membrane filtration.

For example, Siemens helped the City of Amsterdam, New York upgrade its water treatment facility to meet state and federal water quality requirements. The original drinking water plant, built in 1974, consisted of direct filtration, which over time could no longer meet the water quality specifications for Trihalomethane (TTHM) and Haloacetic Acid (HAA5) levels. In 2004, Siemens performed a comprehensive study using a Trident packaged water treatment system that demonstrated the ability to meet the community’s drinking water treatment needs. This successful pilot prompted the city of Amsterdam to purchase seven Trident packaged systems in concrete basins with stainless steel internals. Siemens is also providing underdrain components for five carbon contactors. When started up in late 2010, the new system will allow the city to improve drinking water quality for this city of approximately 20,000 people. 

A plant in Auburn, Nebraska needed to improve the quality of drinking water supplied from a groundwater source under influence, and chose three Trident adsorption clarifier systems and an aerator. The Trident system will allow easy expansion and the flexibility for this plant to consider other source waters in the future.

Plans for a new drinking water plant at Fort Peck Reservation, Montana had been under review/proposal for a number of years, but had not moved forward because of a lack of funds. The ARRA funding provided the necessary infusion of additional money. The resulting new plant includes washtroughs, filter media, rotary surface washers and Multiblock II underdrains from Siemens.

Other ARRA-funded projects include: the village of Deerfield, Michigan, which purchased two Siemens Vantage RO systems to upgrade its drinking water plant; the town of Fort Madison, Iowa, which built a new water treatment plant that incorporates four Horizontal Multicell Pressure Filters from Siemens; South Solon, Ohio water treatment plant’s Aeralater II Iron Removal Packaged Plant from Siemens (Siemens also supplied special level control in a control panel to meet the customer’s needs); Weston, Missouri’s Contraflo Solids Contact Clarifier, a new ESSD launder system for an existing contact clarifier, and a package of filter headloss gauge assemblies from Siemens to expand the town’s drinking water plant.

Siemens also supplied Memcor membrane filtration systems to drinking water plants in Georgetown and Hot Sulfur Springs, Colorado. Georgetown selected the Memcor XP42 system to upgrade the plant and produce enough water to serve 1,090 residents, 350 daily non-residents and up to 1500 daily visitors when the system is installed in the summer of 2010. The town of Hot Sulfur Springs selected the Memcor XS system as part of an upgrade to the existing water plant. The XS system, manufactured at the Siemens facility in Colorado Springs, Colorado, provides Hot Sulfur Springs with energy efficient submerged membrane filtration in a compact, pre-engineered design, which requires minimal expansion of the existing building. 

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