King CountyÔÇÖs Brightwater Treatment Facility

Collaboration sets the tone From the time its comprehensive plan first established the need for a new wastewater treatment facility, officials in King County, Washington, began building consensus and reaching out to the community. The result is a project that will not only meet the needs of a growing region but also incorporate many of the communityÔÇÖs desires. In 1999, officials in King County, Washington finished a long-range master plan that showed that two existing regional wastewater treatment facilities would run out of capacity by 2010.  ┬áKnowing that reaching such limits could mean a building moratorium that could endanger long-term population and economic growth in the county that is home to the city of Seattle and some 1.8 million people, officials set out to plan a third facility. Of course, wastewater treatment plants are not easy facilities to site. Neighborhood opposition is often a given, with concerns about odor, appearance and property values often leading to not-in-my-backyard reactions. Such facilities must also pass strict environmental scrutiny. ÔÇ£We knew it could be a decade or more from the planning stages to the ribbon cutting,ÔÇØ says Annie Kolb-Nelson, media relations specialist with the county. ÔÇ£We also knew we needed to start to get stakeholder support right off the bat.ÔÇØ Once projections established the need for the additional capacity, attention turned to choosing a site. At first, nearly 100 different land areas were in the mix, and a lengthy process of working with elected officials, professional staff, tribal governments, community members and business and environmental leaders unfolded over the course of two years. ÔÇ£It was a very public process,ÔÇØ Kolb-Nelson says, with ample input on the site-selection criteria. Later, the list of sites was narrowed, first to six and then two. At that point, the stateÔÇÖs environmental review process was undertakenÔÇöafter a draft Environmental Impact Statement was published, the county responded in detail to more than 500 letters, comprising approximately 5,000 specific comments in the final EISÔÇöbefore the final site for the treatment facility, known as Brightwater, was chosen. The plant is located just outside Woodinville, a suburb about 25 miles north of Seattle, and will connect to a marine outfall in Puget Sound through a 13-mile tunnel. The public outreach helped create a better project in the long run, says Kolb-Nelson, and the results of those efforts to gather input will be visible throughout the final project. One of the top concerns was odor, and the county has invested heavily in state-of-the-art odor control facilities at Brightwater. The community input also helped lead the county to choose a membrane bioreactor (MBR) process that will treat an average of 36 million gallons of wastewater daily. That process produces cleaner water than other existing treatment technologies and also helps make the plant less visible as a result of the low profile of required superstructures. In fact, plans are being made to distribute some of the reclaimed water from the facility for secondary uses such as irrigation.When itÔÇÖs done, Brightwater will be the largest MBR treatment plant in the country. Because the advanced technology will treat nearly all the wastewater to the stateÔÇÖs high reclaimed water standards, Brightwater will be able to provide up to 21 million gallons of reclaimed water for off-site customers. The publicÔÇÖs desires are also visible on the site already, even though work on the plant wonÔÇÖt be done until early 2011. The input process helped yield a design that allowed large portions of the site to be restored as open space or wildlife habitat, including a 43-acre expanse that will feature trails. ÔÇ£That will be quite a green-space amenity for the community, especially as the area continues to be developed in the future,ÔÇØ says Kolb-Nelson. The plant will also feature an educational learning center. Kolb-Nelson notes that the countyÔÇÖs other plants already host some 3,000 students annually but were not designed with such efforts in mind. Brightwater will feature a dedicated learning center, a building that the county hopes will earn Gold-level certification from the US Green Building CouncilÔÇÖs LEED program. ÔÇ£Sustainability is part of everything that we do, and this project fits right into that philosophy,ÔÇØ Kolb-Nelson says. For instance, soil excavated for the treatment plant has been reused on site to help buffer the plant and as host to native plants. The county has continued outreach efforts as the project has progressed, she notes, using a regular newsletter and community meetings, speaking engagement opportunities and other chances to explain the project as it moves forward. The projectÔÇÖs 13-mile pipeline posed its share of challenges from a design perspective as well. In the end, a deep tunnel-boring process was favored over traditional surface construction. This approach addressed many community concerns about traffic disruption and neighborhood impacts along the path of the tunnel. Another consideration was to build the infrastructure to withstand earthquakes. ÔÇ£Seismic activity was a concern all along,ÔÇØ Kolb-Nelson notes. ÔÇ£We live in a seismically active area, and that had to be taken into account in the design of the structures as well.ÔÇØWork began in 2006 and is now under way on all components of the project. Hoffman Construction and Kiewit Pacific are the general contractors on the treatment plant, with the engineering firm CDM providing construction management oversight. The facility itself involves two separate contracts, one to erect the process facilities that will treat wastewater and a second to handle odor control and a solids-treatment process that will include reclaiming methane gas as a secondary power source. Kenny/Shea/Traylor, Vinci/Parsons RCI/Frontier-Kemper, and JayDee/Coluccio/Tasei are the three contractors building the tunnel sections of the project. Construction management for the conveyance system is provided by Jacobs. The project also includes a large pumping station that delivers wastewater to the treatment plant and a new outfall in Puget Sound. These facilities are being constructed by Kiewit Pacific and Triton Marine Construction, respectively.┬á┬á Kolb-Nelson says that while the seven years between the first discussion of adding a plant and the start of construction seems like a long time, the work done to build consensus and gather input has paid off in the form of a more robust project. ÔÇ£In some ways having people voicing opposition to a project can be an asset. It can be hard for an agency or its engineers to see everything when they are so close to a project. Sometimes it takes an outside perspective to shed light on some of the things a design team may have missed. In this case, the outside view actually did contribute to a better project for everyone involved.ÔÇØ┬á