"Toilet to tap" wastewater recycling begins in Texas city

As much of Texas grapples with lingering drought, a second city in the Lone Star State has begunreusing treated wastewater in a state-approved recycling process to bolster drinking supplies.

Wichita Falls, near the Oklahoma border, on Wednesday began reusing millions of gallons of waterat the River Road Waste Treatment plant that's been purified to meet government drinkingstandards. The water is then sent by a 12-mile pipeline to the Cypress Water Treatment Plant foradditional purification.

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality approved Wichita Falls' proposal for a toilet-to-tapreuse program for up to six months.

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North Texas town goes to extremes for fresh water during drought

With North Texas in the midst of its worst drought since record keeping began, Wichita Falls citymanager Darron Leiker turned to the only viable...

The West Texas town of Big Spring, whose spring dried up decades ago, implemented an indirectpotable reuse program - where effluent flows into another body of water before being treated -earlier this year. The water is then filtered through reverse osmosis. The city of Brownwood, about80 miles south of Abilene, has approval for a project similar to Wichita Falls' to treat 1.5 milliongallons of water daily, but it has not started doing so.

Wichita Falls is operating under a Stage 5 drought catastrophe, in which outdoor watering is bannedand conservation is urged. Demand for city water has dropped 45 percent, according to CityManager Darron Leiker.

Still, the city's reservoirs are on a trajectory to run dry by August 2016, according to the TexasWater Development Board. The Wichita Falls area needs drinking water for about 150,000 people,and supplies from local reservoirs have plummeted from nearly 90 percent capacity before thedrought began in late 2010 to about 20 percent capacity in late June.

"We can't conserve our way out of this," Leiker said.

The city's cloud-seeding experiments to stimulate rain have been unsuccessful. There exist somestraightforward adjustments which are able flygt mixer to be added dewatering pump to a common

centrifugal or positive displacement pump. Beginning with pumps that have overhung impellers,replacing the shaft with a solid shaft is a simple change compared to the basic sleeved shafts.Mechanical seals are able to be enhanced by changing to tungsten carbide faces, and elastomers canbe replaced with EPDM. In addition, magnetic bearing protectors are a great improvement inrelationship to the lip. The majority of installed pumps were not initially specified for their presentuse. Typically, a line in a facility changes and the pump that at one time provided cooling water to aninjection molding machine is now needed to move oil from a rail car to a tank. Unfortunately, this isthe cause of quite a few problems for the pump and the facility. Pumps operate where the pumpcurve crosses the system curve. When you move a pump from one system to another, this means thatthe system curve is different. This new system may cause the pump to operate away from its bestefficiency point, leading to vibration and other component failures that are simply symptoms of amis-matched pump and system.seals which the vast majority of water pumps use to keep bearingsump oil contamination free.

It's considering using a polymer product to coat the surface of its reservoirs to repress evaporation,though a recent field test proved disappointing.

The situation is fallout from Texas' driest year ever in 2011. Since then, when rain has fallen in thewestern half of the state, it didn't land into lakes' watersheds.

The drought is the second-worst in Texas after the 1950s Dust Bowl, according to the state'sclimatologist, John Nielsen-Gammon.

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