Water Treatment Plant

When we went to the water treatment plant last Thursday, we saw the 5 steps of making dirty water into clean water. You can see the difference of the dirty water and clean water clearly. Dirty water is kind of yellowish and smells disgusting, and the clean water is the color like just normal drinking water. Here are the steps of the water treatment.

As we walked up the road, my classmates and I saw a river which had the color, yellow. It looked disgusting because it had all these cans, bottles, and chip rappers and all the other used stuff. However, we have a solution to this. There are huge metal bars which stop the garbages to go in the water that would become cleaner. But these huge bars are for the big chunks of garbage. This is Step 1 - Where you take the garbage out of the water.

To see the next step, the lady who helped us led us down the stairs, where we saw a room. The information below is Step 2 - Aeration. We oxigenated and added minerals to the dirty water because we wanted to make the water a bit cleaner and to get oxygen aeration.

The 3rd step was coagulation - which was pretty interesting to me, since we saw the water already put in chemicals called alum which forms floc, where the dirt comes together and gets bigger. The floc was gross-looking because it looked like diarrhea and some classmates giggled. I think this step was really cool and important. If this step wasn't there, this water treatment thing would be no use.

The 4th step was called sedimentation - which is one of the most important steps. The big flocks change to small flocs because the surface is too heavy. These flocs get out of the water and go in the storage room. The water now is saturated.

The last step is a very important step and it is called filtration, and disinfection. The disinfectant kills the germs or bacterias so the water now is safe to drink. We go in the AC room (finally) and we test the water now. The yellow water is now turned into pure transparent water. The lady shows us how it changed from dirty water to clean water.

The water now that we use in our houses is the water where we got from this water treatment plant right here! And, maybe you are using the water from the water treatment plant right now! I think I learned a whole bunch of new stuff because of this field trip and it was a really useful experience and it was a nice field trip. I know, everybody was sweating (like Ms. Marello said) but it was totally worth it of going in this field trip. We watched the movie after this field trip and they gave us some posters. Changing from a dirty water into a clean water right in the water treatment plant... Isn't it cool?