By Steve Sousa

The Water Pollution Control Plant helps the community by making the Kennebec river beautiful and safe to use. The plant removes 95% of the pollutants in the water and return it to the Kennebec river.

The plant works like this: water goes through the blowers which keeps the light waste from clogging up the tubes. The water then goes into the primary clarifiers (10 feet deep) which filter the water from from sludge and other small objects. It then goes into a bacteria pool which gets rid of most other waste. The secondary clarifiers separates the bacteria and the water. The bacteria goes back to the bacteria pool and the water goes into the chlorine tank and then back into the river. All the organic material is filtered out in the primary clarifier and compacted with lime slurry to make sludge. The sludge is later used on farms as fertilizer.

To become a worker there you need to have graduated from a technology/vocational school. The staff has operation and maintenance duties. On staff there is a superintendent, Brent Dickey, who I have interviewed. Also at the plant regularly, is one operator and one mechanic. All plant employees are licensed by the State of Maine as wastewater treatment plant operators.

The plant is manned from 7:00 am to 4:00 pm on weekdays. At 8:00pm the septic waste is put through the cycle to be cleaned. The plant is checked by an employee on weekends and holidays.

Skowhegan wastewater collection system dates back to the early 1900's when the stormwater, sewage water, and septic waste all came to the facility through the same pipe. The plant is currently working mostly the same as in 1972. In 1996 the CSO (combined sewer overflow) master plan was proposed to make the peak flows increase. It was contracted with Wright Pierce Engineers of Topsham to perform an engineering evaluation of the plant to determine the impacts of the additional flow and load. Their goal is to develop a long term strategy to abate CSO discharges and keep providing effective and efficient operations.