Largest Water Reclamation Plant in the USA Specified Headworks International Screens For Their Upgrade

One of the most well-known wastewater treatment plants in the USA is the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant in Los Angeles, California.  Hyperion WRP is located in southwest Los Angeles next to the Dockweiller State Beach on Santa Monica Bay near LAX airport. Starting out as a simple screening plant in 1925, today the plant is considered one of the largest wastewater treatment plants in the world. In the United States, the plant is the largest, by volume, west of the Mississippi River. A short and extremely interesting history of the plant can be found on Wikipedia.

Hyperion WRP reclaims an astonishing 250 mgd (950,000 m³/day) per day of wastewater! The plant is not the first to reclaim its wastewater, but it is the first on such a large scale. Besides being one of the largest wastewater treatment plants in the world, because of its location and appearance the plant has been used several times for films and television shows, among them The Battle for the Planet of the Apes and The Terminator.

Los Angeles is not a city looking for a quick, cheap fix to their treatment solutions without regard to the impact the wrong equipment might have on operations or costs over time.  Their operators in Los Angeles understand that each purchase is an investment of their citizens’ tax payer dollars, and the equipment and systems they specify for their plants must work dependably while being robust enough to take the beatings that these extremely large plants must deal with day-in and day-out with low life-cycle costs.  Their goal is to efficiently reclaim for reuse as much of the municipality’s wastewater as possible.  Thus, they have a strong reputation as one of the most innovative wastewater treatment facilities in the world.

As Headworks’ installation base and its reputation grew across the country, Los Angeles, like many other cities, recognized the superiority of the design and quality of the Headworks Bar Screen.  The City purchased the first four units for their Tillman plant 12 years ago, then two more units to improve their plant at Terminal Island. Finally, in 2016, Hyperion WRP started planning to have its aging and difficult to maintain old fashioned climber-type screens upgraded.  Headworks was named as the sole source for the new screening equipment for the project!

Working closely in 2017 and 2018 with the City’s selected contractor, The Murray Company, Headworks delivered eight new bar screens: four MS1 Series Bar Screens with 3/4″ Bar Spacing and four MS1 Series Bar Screens with 3/8” Bar Spacings, along with a Sluice Trough, Slide Gates and Diverter Chutes.

“The equipment works so well that the plant is in awe of what it pulls out. Way more than before.” Robert Nicol, Foreman of The Murray Company, Hyperion WRP project contractor.

Headworks provided the Screens in pairs for installation with each pair having one Screen with 3/4’ (19mm) Bar Spacing and the other having 3/8” (10mm) Bar Spacing. The Bar Screens are installed in 10’ wide x 14’ deep channels, each designed for a maximum flow of 133 mgd (500,000 m³/d). The new Sluice Trough collects the screenings discharge from all of the Bar Screens for distribution to two (2) different solids handling processes at the plant. The Sluice Trough is an enormous 170 feet (52m) long with a conveying flow of approximately 900 gpm (3,300 lpm). An interesting factoid is that in addition to the regular flow coming to the plant, solids collected from other LA Plants are collected and pumped to Hyperion WRP for final removal and treatment. These solids travel for many miles underground across Los Angeles.

Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant is considered one of the most technologically advanced wastewater treatment plants in the world and Headworks is proud to have been selected to provide its gold standard MS Series Bar Screens for their screening needs. Headworks co-founder and Senior VP Gerald Seidl visited these babies a few weeks ago and created a short video of the facility.  Take a look at one of the largest screening operations in the world.

With over 25 years of experience in every type of municipal challenge, our talented engineers will have the right solution for your screening and compacting needs.  Contact our local manufacturers’ representatives in your area or our sales engineers at hw@headworksintl.com or +1.713.647.6667 to discuss how we can get you the results you’re looking for! See all our product lines and read more about how we solve problems around the world at www.headworksinternational.com.

How to Save the Planet

By Michele LaNoue

This July our poor planet seems to be spinning out of control.  Whether you agree or not that a lot of the climate change has been exacerbated by our own ingenuity and our inability to stop ourselves from enjoying the inventions we’ve created that are making things worse, the planet is heating up nonetheless.  The northern hemisphere is experiencing all time new heat records.  Anchorage for the first time ever has hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit…for days…in June. There are now tours being touted in Juneau, Alaska, around the famous Mendhall Glacier of the “new ecosystem which used to be covered by ice.”  Ever see the Twilight Zone Episode The Midnight Sun?  I did.  I’ve been thinking about that episode a lot lately.

I’ve also been thinking about the oceans.  For decades, I had a newspaper article on our refrigerator describing the floating island of plastic and trash in the Pacific, although ironically it was lost in the Hurricane Harvey Flood of our house in 2017. The article was there to inspire me each day to go forth and do better by our planet’s water resources.  What happened to that island of trash?  We all know the answer – it got bigger, more of them grew, microplastics breaking off were ingested by the fish and we and the polar bears ate the fish and now we have microplastic in us. We sold a lot of screens in California, Texas, Hong Kong, New York, and other coastal regions, which collected as much of the trash as possible, but still plastic made its insidious way to the water by careless acts of people.

What else do I think about? Food. Food manufacturers seem to be focused on needing to make more food, cheaper, faster, bigger, cheaper. (I meant to say cheaper twice, by the way.) They are focused, naturally, on profits, but at what price to the consumer? As a kid, we had apple trees in the yard.  In those days, “organic” was pretty much everything.  It wasn’t even part of the shopping vocabulary.  My parents certainly weren’t going to bother spraying the trees.  So, we’d grab one, look for a worm hole and hope for the best when taking a bite.  Did I eat apples with worms in them? I did.  And though it was icky, it wasn’t poisonous.  Now we have chicken that has been grown in tiny boxes; fed antibiotics, growth hormones, and the nasty unsellable bits of other animals; and had their dead carcasses injected with “marinade” to make them heavier and “more tasty.”  Did someone in the chicken business tell me about the marinade? They did.

Is organic food better for you?  Well, my information is somewhat anecdotal, but while shopping one night after work in an almost empty grocery store, I noticed a rat nibbling on the apples – in the organic section.  We know rats aren’t stupid.  Did I buy some of those apples? I did.

Like most people, I think about the polarization of people around the world and how are inability to sit down and discuss issues has become less possible.  I think about where that could lead us and how nearer to world war we seem than ever before.  Sometimes there seems to be no solution to all of this.  But I’m not giving up.

What will save our mental health while the planet continues to revolve towards extinction of man and animals, leaving cockroaches to rule?  (And, no joke, just as I was giving the final edit to this essay, a news alert popped up on my laptop that said “Cockroaches have become immune to insecticides. Have a great day!” You can’t make this stuff up. But I digress.)

Will young people have the will and energy to change the planet’s destiny?  It does seem that they are taking action in a very positive way and being heard on the world stage.  I recall the young in the streets in the 60’s, sometime after The Midnight Sun episode aired.  Eventually, people of all ages took to the streets to join them and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 came into being.  Public pressure in the streets ultimately forced Nixon to end the Vietnam War in 1973. And public pressure forced Nixon to resign in 1974.  So, the public has a lot of power if you think about it.

For the problems with climate change, plastic pollution, mismanagement of our food supplies, and peace, we need more people committed to science, engaging in positive politics, and having the energy to stay vocal in demanding we do better.

And we also need something that will drive us to change.

What is that something?  Space aliens.  Yes.  Really.  This is my new somewhat “tongue-in-cheek” theory.

On May 26^th of this year, The New York Times covered a story about UFO spacecraft sightings by US Navy Super Hornet pilots off the East Coast. When I first saw the article, I thought: “Great. It’s not enough what is happening in the world. Now we are going to be invaded by aliens.” And I wasn’t thinking of aliens from other countries on the news all of the time lately.  I have no problem with those aliens.  I even married one and gave birth to a hybrid one.  No, I’m thinking about those strange androgynous fellows who come out of a space ship or flying saucer.  It could be the last blow for our species on planet Earth.

Or….

The invasion of the space aliens finally gets us all to act in concert across the world.  Faced with a common foe, our government leaders who know that they, too, are going to be toast if they don’t work together, reach out to each other and share the very best of their science, looking for the silver bullet that will eliminate the threat to the species of man.  First, Merkel and Modi maneuver for Man; then Trudeau and Trump try to tame the total terror; Kuwait’s Emir Al-Sabah sends scientists to Egypt’s el-Sisi; Bhutan’s King Jigme Wangchuk and Kim Jong-un jump in to help; Queen Elizabeth and Queen Margrethe meet in the Midlands to muddle it out; and even that little pesky Putin pitches in with Pavlopoulos of Greece.

And Man and Planet Earth are saved!

An alternative ending?  The aliens win, but then leave the planet to flee from the insect population, not knowing they have housed in their spacecraft the larvae of the unkillable inimitable cockroach, Man’s final revenge.

The History Channel started a 6-part series on Unidentified: Inside America’s UFO Investigation.  So, hey, maybe it’s true.

Have a good day!

Summer Book Review July Episode
A Gentleman in Moscow
By Amor Towles

This book was a Christmas present from good friends of mine.  The perfect hostess present.  At 460+ pages, it promised to keep me entertained for an extended period of time and the promise was certainly kept.

The story takes place over a 32-year period, from 1922 to 1954.  Our protagonist is Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov.  The opening page is a poem written in 1913 by the Count and the next pages are the transcript of his trial in 1922 where the Bolshevik Emergency Committee of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs finds him guilty of being a man without purpose and a noble.  But for the poem he had written which was taken as a call to arms for the Revolution in Russia, he would have been taken out and shot.  Instead, he is sentenced to permanent “non-personhood” to live under house arrest in the attic of the Metropol Hotel where he had been residing in a splendid suite the last 4 or 5 years.

This story could easily have taken dark turns along the way.  After all, the story of the country under Stalin during much of the period this book covers certainly gives every opportunity for a bleak and often dangerous context.  But Towles takes another route.  His Count Rostov is an example of fortitude, flexibility, dignity, kindness, and surviving with his soul intact.  The characters that he surrounds himself with in the Metropol are all as well developed as the Count himself.  These characters, some who stay, some who come in and go out of his life, help to carry the thrust of the story which in the end is about friendship and love, the ultimate purpose of humankind.

There is a very illuminating interview with Amor Towles on his website, if you care to read how he very carefully structured this book.  His explanation of how difficult it was to write the first half of the book without bogging down the reader with too many details that would come together in the second half of the book I found particularly interesting as I found the first half a bit of a slog and then suddenly couldn’t put it down until the end.  If you choose to read A Gentleman in Moscow, I strongly suggest you stick with it.  We all could use a Count Rostov in our life, as a friend and example of who we should be.  I’m glad that I was able to know him during the hours I spent reading this fascinating book.  I’m sure you will find your life richer, too, for having known this splendid character.