Tampa Bay Water, owner of the desalination plant, is Florida's largest wholesale water suppliers, providing drinking water to its member governments - including Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties and the cities of New Port Richey, St. Petersburg and Tampa. When operating at its capacity, 25mgd (million gallonsnper day) (1Gallon = 3.6 Litres), the desalination plant provides up to 10 % of the Tampa Bay region's drinking water supply to more than 2.4 million people.
The desalination plant total project cost was $154 million.
Susan MacPherson (General Manager) took the team on a tour of the plant. She covered aspects of the plant's original design, operational model, retrofit capital investment programs, lessons learnt, operator/ employee challenges, and maintenance and quality performance. The below photo shows the banks of filtration vessels at the plant.
In the afternoon, John Trout (Senior Manager - Monitoring and Laboratory Services) showed the team Tampa’s (relatively new) $146 million off stream raw water storage reservoir. The reservoir, at capacity, holds 15.5 billion gallons of raw water. John highlighted the proactive approach taken for effective Blue Green Algae management, using an extensive network of aeration systems. Despite some issues with the dam wall cracks appearing, John detailed the current monitoring and the future plans for the storage to ensure dam wall safety and stability.
We also got to see the reservoir's aligators, who looked quite at home in the reservoir.
No need for concern about recreational activity on this raw water storage !
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