The Yonkers Joint Wastewater Treatment Plant (YJWWTP)

I recently was lucky enough to go on a tour of this water treatment plant in Yonkers.  Yonkers is a city just north of New York City, surrounded by suburbs and country.  I was unable to take very many pictures because my camera batteries died quickly.  Below is a small sample of all of the cool things to be found at the plant.  Sadly, there are no images of the giant open vats of processed water.

Maximum Security Gate (that was open all day...)

Art 1979deco architecture

Thousands of really nice valves, flanges, meters, and burst disks.

Several very large hallways; the entire campus was something like 25 acres.

These were two giant (perhaps 4 foot diameter) pipes.  Very rusty also.

Control room.

Large motors used to spin centrifuges:  These spin the water out of any sludge that is removed from the system.  This takes millions of gallons of water per day, but only produces a few trucks worth of sludge (that is good, if you can't do the math.)

The plant uses more than $50,000 a month worth of electricity (and probably at a discounted rate all the same.)  HUGE amount of power.  These fuses or switches or whatever are probably just for a small set of machines, one can only wonder what the mains look like.

Sometimes money is recovered in the rag recovery (skimmer) device.

The control panel for the skimmer system.  Every few minutes, a strainer removes rags from the raw input, which is a shocking amount.  Who is dumping rags into the sewer like this?  Also, note the floating bathtub toys on top of the panel.  These probably were flushed by kids down the toilet.

The skimmer device in action.  Rags are deposited on a conveyor belt and removed.

These interesting tanks greatly reduce the smell produced by the plant.  Frankly, very few parts of the plant had any bad smell at all.  And there was no noticeable smell off the campus proper, though at some times there may be.  A great deal of time, effort, money, and manpower is applied to keep odors down.  And it works really well.  Among other things, this was one of the most impressive parts of the tour; how smart and effective the whole process is.  Those of you in Yonkers should be proud.

Who knew a Joint Wastewater Treatment Plant (JWWTP) would be so complicated?