WESTFIELD—According to the city’s Department of Public Works director David Billips, the new water treatment facility coming to Westfield has been making progress and portions of the plan are looking good.
Billips said that the granular activated carbon (GAC) filter system, which is set to be built behind East Mountain Country Club near Westfield’s well eight, is over half completed design-wise, and scale testing on the water to be going into the system may be done soon, as well. Officials hope that the new system will be able to filter out perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) in the water, which had previously caused wells seven and eight to come offline.
David Billips, director of Westfield Department of Public Works
“We are past the 60 percent design. We expect 90 percent sometime in July,” he said. “Scale testing should be done this week, preliminary results look pretty good.”
According to Billips, surveying of the site is also “looking pretty good,” but they are still going through permitting to build at the site.
“We’re looking to build in the late summer,” he said.
Billips said that the facility, once completed, will be operated through an automated computer system, similar to the one that currently exists at the city’s other GAC facility on Shaker Road. That facility, according to Billips, was built over 20 years ago to treat contamination that had occurred due to tobacco fields in the city and is still operational.
While the facility will be visited daily it will contain systems to alert workers of any problems. In addition, Billips said any operating costs would be absorbed into the operating budget for the department.
The filtration system construction and design is being funded through a $5 million bond that the city has. Billips said that so far a little over $100,000 of that bond is estimated to have been used on the project. According to Westfield Mayor Brian Sullivan, less than $2 million of the bond is expected to be used for the project, with the remainder being used for other water systems projects in the city.
Billips could not confirm a cost of the project though, until all testing is complete.
“Until it goes out to bid we can’t tell,” he said. “Until we get bench scale testing back we won’t have accurate cost estimates.”
