Joe New Introduced our speaker, Ms. Lacie Wever, from the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD). Lacie is a Community Education Outreach Specialist with HRSD. She received a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Thought and Practice and a Master's from Regent University. She previously worked for Keep Norfolk Beautiful before HRSD.
HRSD’s main process is to turn the dirty water from homes and industry into clean drinkable water. Water was typically produced from wells and in our area, there was so much water 100 years ago the pressure pushed the water into the pipes for the community homes. Today’s high demand for water has lowered the underground aquifer level requiring the use of pumps to extract water from below ground. Wells are now going down 200 feet to reach clean water.
Up through the middle of the 1900s, wastewater (containing sewage) from homes was discharged into waterways and eventually into the Chesapeake Bay. This caused people to become sick and was hurting the ecosystem in the bay. HRSD now cleans the water before discharge to meet the Total Maximum Discharge Load (TMDL) as set by the EPA for contaminating levels such as Phosphates and Nitrogen.
In the Hampton Roads area, the lowering of the aquifer has allowed the infiltration of saltwater from the ocean to infiltrate the freshwater aquifer we depend on. SWIFT uses an 8-step process to clean the water, match it to the composition of the natural aquifer water, and pumps the cleaned water into the aquifer, programmed for 1 Million gallons per day. It becomes a natural reservoir of clean water for future use and replacing saltwater.
The SWIFT building is a research facility for the area's grad students and an educational environment for children. In the future, we hope to see 5 SWIFT facilities in the area co-located with the water treatment plants. Later this fall, we should see groundbreaking for the SWIFT facility on the James River Water Treatment site. The goal is to return 120 M gallons to the aquifer from the 290 M gallons we extract and use.
The funding for this project initially came from the EPA ($125M) and the other financing coming from the consumer usage charges. Some interesting facts are the water in the aquifer travels slowly, about 3 days to cover 50 feet, and the water for the aquifer we tap actually enters the ground around Richmond.
The Meeting
President Jim rang the bell at 12:30 PM. Maintaining our singing club status, Eleanor and Roger Schoonover lead us in singing two favorites…R_O_T_A_R_Y and God Bless America. This was followed by The Four-Way Test and Bob Healy’s fifth question, “will it be fun?”
Visitation/Introduction of Visitors
President Jim Mentioned Ann Morgan was recuperating at home.
Today’s guest was Major Donald Dohmann from the Salvation Army. Maj Dohmann has been married for 22 years to Laura and has two children. He was previously assigned to the Richmond area.
Club Business
Three events are on the books for March and we still need volunteers for each of the events.
On the 10th we are going back to the Foodbank for the morning shift (9-12 PM).
On the 24th we will be working a Food Pantry at the Basilica (downtown) from 8-1130 AM.
Then on the 30th, we will be cleaning up Barraud Park (from 930-1200PM) just as we did last year. Check the website for more details.
President Jim gave a quick update on the Hunton YMCA Zoom Room. The room is 70% complete with 6-7 Chromebooks for the children to use in support of the virtual Zoom educational sessions.
Michael Desplaines provided a quick update on the Grants. The deadline was the end of February with 60 grant applications received. With $50K to be disbursed through this process, the selection of the recipients should be completed during the first week of April.
School of the Week: Sherwood Forest Elementary School
Happy Bucks/Fines.
- Joe New gave Happy Bucks for his Hokies.
- Eleanor Schoonover gave Happy Bucks for a better musical performance this week than last week (technical challenges).
- Lastly, President Jim gave happy Bucks for all the fresh new faces that were seen at this club meeting.
Meeting adjourned at 1:32 PM.