Treatment Plant Operator- How to Run a Plant with Seasonal Fluctuations

The award-winning town of Hampton team finds ways to deal with substantial variations in seasonal flows and influent strength.

Public Works director Chris Jacobs sums up the challenges of treating wastewater in the town of Hampton, New Hampshire: “It’s like we’re trying to run a bakery, but the cake mix constantly changes.”

That’s largely because Hampton is an Atlantic beachfront tourist community of 15,000 whose population swells to as high as 30,000 in summer. On top of that, some 100,000 visitors may crowd the mile-long Hampton Beach on hot summer days. Adding to the difficulty, a brewery opened in town two years ago, and its wastewater sharply increased the BOD loading.

The job of finessing the Leavitt E. Magrath Wastewater Treatment Plant through those changes falls to a seven-member team led by Mike Dube, operations manager, and Mike Carle, chief operator. Aside from a hiccup here and there, the two have kept the plant running efficiently and in compliance with its permit since they arrived in the late 1990s.

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