Posted by: D_C_
Posted by: KenN
I'm pretty up to speed on water treatment. I've spent 20 years as a consulting engineer, working on design and start-up of water and wastewater treatment plants.
That was question I had - is the design of the Seymour filtration plant reliant on the quality of the water coming in? Would outcomes be worse if the water coming in was of poorer quality?
Seymour-Capilano Filtration Plant (SCFP) was built primarily to deal with the huge particulate problems that resulted from mudslides in the watershed (remember that year when our tap water was grey/brown?). But it also has the full regime of treatment processes for disinfection (UV and chlorination). The plant can treat up to 1,800 million litres/day. Certainly the plant will be affected by incoming water quality, but the capacity limit is based on the worst-case.
Keep in mind that the worst water quality is usually in the winter months (when the mudslides are likely due to ground saturation) when water consumption is at its lowest. During summer months, water consumption is high, but source water quality is typically better.
So bottom line, SCFP is unlikely to hit a capacity cap due to source water quality - it's already been built into the model.