Interesting Facts about your Wastewater Treatment Plant

Good Afternoon, Runaway Bay!

My name is Roddy Boston and the Mayor added me to the Runaway Bay Public Works Task Force in 2023. I currently have an “A” Wastewater Treatment License and serve as Deputy Director of Public Works for Decatur.

Interesting Facts about your Wastewater Treatment Plant:

Capacity of the current plant: 400,000 gallons

A wastewater treatment plant's capacity isn’t determined by how much it can hold at any one time. It is determined by how much wastewater it can process in a 24-hour period.

The numbers used are the average of one month of your daily flows. Then we take 12 months of those averages to calculate the “Annual Average”.

TCEQ allows us to use the annual average to determine how much development you, as a city, can handle with the current facilities.

Using this averaging system, your plant is currently sitting at around 25% capacity.

The TCEQ rule for determining whether a wastewater plant is nearing, at, or above capacity is known as the 75/90 rule found in TAC Chapter 217.

At 75% capacity, your plant would process 300,000 gallons per day on an annual average. If this were the case, the city would need to be involved in engineering for an expansion of the existing plant or the construction of a brand-new plant.

At 90% capacity, your plant would process 360,000 gallons per day on an annual average. If this were the case, the city would need to be past engineering and under expansion or new construction for a new plant.

So, as you can see, at only 25% capacity, the city has plenty of room to expand, population-wise.

As you can imagine, using averages gives the city plenty of time to plan for and ready themselves for additional development.

Some people have seen the plant from the top and voiced their concern that it's running “full” and shouldn’t be.

Don’t listen to those people.

Wastewater plants are designed to run “full”. If not, then it wouldn’t properly treat the wastewater from one tank to the next.

That is probably more information than you thought you’d ever need to know about a wastewater treatment plant, but the more you know, the more informed you are!

More information to come!

If you have any additional questions, please let me know!

Roddy Boston