Coast To Coast

Not Wolly Beach pictured here but Druif Beach which is about 3,000 miles south of Quincy!

Nine Miles Out

Graves Light is the outermost lighthouse in Boston Harbor. Nine and a half miles is the distance of the outfall tunnel and pipework from the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Over 2 million residents from Quincy and 42 other cities and towns in the Boston area rely on this efficient engineering marvel. The ocean has water depths of 100 feet or more here. By looking at this beautiful scene you wouldn't know that not far from here, over 50 diffusers release the treated wastewater into the ocean.

Balmy

Happy Monochrome Monday!

This is a parting capture from my excursion to the tropics.

Sludge To Fertilizer II

Someone was thinking when they engineered this public works project. The byproduct of the digestion process is 70 percent methane gas, which is captured and piped to boilers that generate enough heat to warm the buildings on the site as well as for the heat-dependent treatment processes. The steam from those boilers is sent through a steam turbine generator (STG) producing an average of approximately 3 megawatts of electricity. The digested sludge from the giant eggs leaves Deer Island through the Inter-Island Tunnel to MWRA's pelletizing facility at Fore River in Quincy, where it is further processed into a fertilizer product.

Sludge To Fertilizer

The process being used to deal with our waste water is very efficient. After waste water is treated, digestion then occurs in 12 distinctive egg-shaped anaerobic digesters, each 90 feet in diameter and approximately 130 feet tall. Mimicking the stomach's natural digestion process, microorganisms naturally work to break sludge and scum down into methane gas, carbon dioxide, solid organic byproducts, and water. Digestion significantly reduces sludge quantity.

A Giant Dozen

These giant eggs can be seen along Boston's coastal areas. They are used in one of the final stages of our wastewater treatment.

Odor Control

The MWRA engineers developed some really strong odor eaters because I didn't detect any odors in the smoke stack area at Deer Island.