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To the editor:
Today I had an opportunity to inspect the completed Sperryvillc sewage treatment plant in the com pany of an officer of the Water and Sewer Authority. I would like to share with your readers some of my observations.
Essentially, the sewage (solids and^q^ids) is flushed from toilets in the village into WSA owned and installed septic tanks near the generating toilets in individual buildings (called “EDUs,” the liquid portion of the sewage (and only the liquid portion) moves from the WSA septic tanks under pump pressure down to a big black metal structure at the treatment plant where it is treated with chlorine and aerated to promote combination with oxygen in the atmosphere. This treated liquid waste is then pumped from the plant directly into the Thornton River alongside the plant.
There is no sludge, as such, generated at the treatment plant — either wet or dry. No doubt a thin layer of solid matter (or sludge) will accumulate at the bottom of the big black box with the passage of time and this small amount of sediment, if dried, might well amount to only 46 pounds per year, as Daphne Hutchinson recently stated in her article in your newspaper.
However, sludge in much larger amounts will accumulate in the WSA septic tanks at the EDUs (as in any septic tank) and must be removed periodically for the system to continue to function.
I was told that about 20 EDUs in Sperryville are now hooked up to the system while the total number to be connected is about 250. Acceptance of the sewage treatment system and of the user fees necessary to support its operation has always been a problem in Sperryville itself and, apparently, continues to be. And yet, as long as one EDU in Sperryville remains out of the system, the whole purpose of the treatment plant (to cope with Sperryville’s high priority pollution problem) has been defeated. We must ask what is being done to get all toilets in Sperryville connected to the treatment plant? I have always believed, and still do, that, in the end, the operation of this plant will become a general Rappahannock County budget item. The numbers involved have always pointed to this conclusion despite repeated public assurances that the Sperryville plant’s operations would be made self-supporting through the user fees collected by WSA.
We are left with this question:
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