Water Supply
Groundwater Supply System Rehabilitation – Joliet, IL
Awards: Engineering Excellence Award
Size: 33 million-gallons-per-day
The City of Joliet’s initial plan was to convert from groundwater supply to surface water supply. When the surface water plan became cost-prohibitive, the resulting project became one of the largest groundwater system upgrades in the country, impacting every component in the water system including wells, well houses, transmission mains, treatment plants, and storage facilities.
A system the size of Joliet’s (10 plants) can have operation issues such as spare part inventory and operator training. The solution was plants designed with identical equipment and operational procedures, eventhough they are of varying sizes and capacities. This was accomplished with a singular modular design using the same equipment and operations.
Plants were also designed for easy treatment process modification. Hydrous manganese oxide (HMO) treatment was the most cost-effective, but future regulation may require a shift to radium selective media (RSM). Several simple modifications to the usual HMO process design allows these plants to be quickly converted to RSM.
