I spent the day today working on a story for the weekend about the expansion of the county sewer treatment plant expansion. You can look for it in Sunday's paper. For the story, I visited the county's treatment plant in Mechanicville. I spent about an hour walking around the plant with James DiPasquale, executive director of the sewer district.

Now, having previously visited the water treatment plant in Saratoga Springs, I can say that the process is almost frighteningly similar. The first stage at the sewer treatment plant is to remove the solids, which represents about 5% of the total sewage.

From that point, the two processes are almost identical, with the liquid flowing into the plant (be it water from a reservoir or waste from the county) sits in a series of settling pools, where water is aerated and stimulated with the aim of getting an solid waste to settle out. At both plants, the last stage is to use ultraviolet light to purify the water, before it either flows to your faucet or the Hudson River.

There is, however, one key difference. Some of the settling pools at the waste plant contain microorganisms that eat the waste. The whole process, explained DiPasquale, is designed to separate the solid from the liquid.

The really interesting thing is what they do with the solid waste they remove. It gets dumped into a gigantic incinerator four stories tall, and burned at 1,500 degrees. The incinerator wasn't running when I visited but it was still uncomfortably warm in the room housing the machine. And... ever wonder what burning shit smells like?

In order to expand the plant and rehabilitate some existing conditions without interrupting the service, contractors will build new settling tanks adjacent to existing ones. Once the new tanks go online, the older ones will temporarily shut down for rehab, and when that work is finished, the entire plant will come online.