St. John’s & Drums Wastewater Treatment Plant

Insufficient capacity prompted the Butler Township Wastewater Department to expand its wastewater facilities. Prior to the design of the project, a value planning session was held to evaluate options for treatment of sewage and upgrading the plant was determined to be the most efficient alternative.

This project had two major design components: the expansion of the St. John’s Treatment Facility from 0.6 million gallons per day (MGD) to 2.2 MGD and the conversion of the Drums Treatment Plant into a 1.0 MGD pump station. The Drums Wastewater Treatment Facility was abandoned and replaced with a 1.0 MGD pumping station. Wastewater is now conveyed via a 9,000-foot, 14-inch force main and 18-inch gravity sewer line from the proposed pumping station to the St. John’s Wastewater Treatment Facility for ultimate treatment and discharge to Nescopeck Creek.

The St. John’s facility was converted to a Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR) configuration for wastewater treatment. The SBR process removes nitrogen to meet the Chesapeake Bay Standards for BNR reduction. One of the design constraints the design team had to overcome was keeping the existing treatment plant operational while the construction of the new facilities took place. This involved the development of a very detailed construction sequence which divided the project into three different phases of construction.