SEQUIM — Anything that goes down a drain or is flushed down a toilet in Sequim ends up, in short order, in an 18-inch pipe that takes it due east of town to the concrete-and-steel compound that is the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
When the wastewater arrives, it is brown, silty and foamy.
And while it doesn’t reek, it does give off a distinctly ripe odor.
The water is carrying human waste, of course, along with soap, cleaners, paper, food scraps — sometimes even small McDonald’s toys, said lead operator Al Chrisman, which are “just the right size to go down the toilet.”
A total of 99.8 percent, in fact, is water.
But what’s in that other two-tenths of a percent can pack a wallop to human and environmental health, and the operation designed to weed it out is sophisticated, requiring constant monitoring and attention to detail.
“It doesn’t take much to make water unusable,” Chrisman said.
15 years of monitoring
Chrisman and his co-workers — Pete Tjemsland, Jim McBride and Dave Howe — recently were recognized for 15 years of exemplary laboratory work that exceeds state standards for wastewater monitoring.
Indeed, in many ways the Sequim treatment plant has been ahead of the curve in developments in the out-of-sight, out-of-mind world of sewage treatment for most of the past 40 years.
In 1990, the plant became the first in the state to have a certified lab for testing water on-site.
It has used what’s called “secondary treatment” — a kind of liquid compost pile with natural microorganisms that break down organic matter — since being built in 1966, which was decades before other cities in the area adopted the method.
An upgrade in 1998 allowed the plant to produce what’s known as “reuse water,” which instead of being dumped into the Strait of Juan de Fuca is returned for non-potable uses such as irrigation, street cleaning and stream recharge.
And two years ago, Sequim, along with the city of Forks, became the first in the world in adopting a method of processing biosolids — the stuff left over after secondary treatment — into a soil conditioner.