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Water Treatment Facility
The City and County of Broomfield’s Water Treatment Facility is a state-of-the-art, 20.0 million gallon per day conventional Water Treatment Facility. The total water production for 2008 was 3,511,336,000 gallons. Of that total, the City and County of Broomfield's facility produced 2,075,948,000 gallons. Denver Water produced 1,434,680,000 gallons. This is an average daily production of 9,593,814 gallons. The peak production day was 22,054,000 gallons on August 1, 2008. The average use for a typical family home in the United States is 163,000 gallons of water per year. The average consumption per person per day is approximately 216 gallons. What does it take to treat the water?
The filters consist of an under-drain system, silica gravel, garnet sand, silica sand, and anthracite media. The media has a total depth of 40 inches. These filters will remove the remaining solids or colloidal material.
The water will then flow into a disinfection tank. The chlorine is
added at the beginning of this tank, which has a serpentine configuration
to ensure enough contact time between the water and chlorine for complete
disinfection to take place. The water flows through this tank into the
clearwell. The pH corrective chemical (soda ash), the corrosion inhibitor
(sodium silicate), the fluoride additive (sodium silicofluoride) are added
at this time. A solution of aqueous ammonia is also added to convert the
free chlorine to combined chlorine as the final disinfectant residual for
the distribution system. Chemicals used by the City and County of Broomfield Water Treatment Facility:
From the clearwell, the water is transmitted through pipelines to storage tanks for distribution to the Broomfield residents.
The principal law governing drinking water safety in the United States is the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Enacted initially in 1974, the SDWA authorizes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) to establish comprehensive national drinking water regulations to ensure drinking water safety. Drinking water regulations are issued by a regulatory agency under the authority of federal, state, or local laws. These regulations established by USEPA typically require water utilities to meet specified water quality standards. Regulations also require that certain monitoring be conducted, that specified treatment be applied, and that suppliers submit reports to document that the regulations are being met. The quality of this water is constantly being monitored from the source to the consumer’s tap to ensure the highest quality is maintained. See the Water Quality Report (Printable Version) for more information. The staff at the Water Treatment Facility consists of ten full-time and one part-time positions. For more information, please contact us at
303-464-5600. |
the flow of raw (untreated) water into
the treatment process. The majority of the treatment process components
are automatically controlled via computers based on flow metering at this
structure. The rapid mix basins are where chemicals are added and mixed
with the water. These chemicals are needed to remove the extremely small
suspended solids from the water. The flocculation basins provide an
environment where the chemicals and the suspended solids interact to
accumulate into larger masses called "floc." In the sedimentation basins,
the majority of the "floc" settles out of the water and the supernatant is
drawn off and conveyed via underground piping to the facility’s building
for filtration.
