Today Jacqueline, my fellow Shad intern at Stantec Inc., and I were able to go out on a site visit to the Pine Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. Once we got there Simon, our tour guide, showed us around the whole plant. While we were walking around and learning about the wastewater treatment process, there were contractors on site still in the building process. Pine Creek was just finishing off completion of its first phase of development. It was proposed that this buildout will have the capacity to handle 700,000,000 L of wastewater a day!

One of the most exciting things was seeing the underground tunnels and how they sprawled around the whole site. While walking through, we saw pipes of different colours. These pipes carried a variety of fluids; hot water, return activated sludge (RAS), waste activated sludge (WAS) or the effluent after each small process, and were colour coded based on what they would carry. Pine Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant has some of the most sophisticated water treatment technologies in the world, which allows for cleaning of the water in such a way that it is able to be discharged to the Bow River. Overall there was a lot to learn about where our wastewater goes and how it is treated.

Maxwell Nguyen
Hometown: Calgary, AB