Hello to All of Our HeadsUp Readers,
We are so excited! This June is a momentous month for Headworks International. The company was created 25 years ago with the sole aim of making a significant and positive impact on the world’s water resources. On June 21st, our mission hits a truly inspiring milestone: our equipment will have screened the debris from 100 TRILLION gallons of water (approximately 380 cubic kilometers)! How much water is that?
One visual description I found is that a million-gallon swimming pool would be 267 feet long (81+ meters), 50 feet wide (15+ meters), and 10 feet deep (3+ meters). Now, multiple that pool image by 100 million in your head. Doesn’t help? Well, here’s another way to visualize it – Niagara Falls flows at a rate of 757,500 gallons a second, so 100 trillion gallons would let you see that magnificent waterfall cascading downward for over 4 years! That is a lot of water! Oh, and add to that another 500 billion gallons of water our newer HW Bio division has processed to make it clean enough for reuse for cities and industries around the world. The team at Headworks has certainly made a terrific start on our collective mission!
Staying with the theme of “big things,” back in December’s HeadsUp issue, we wrote about our having finished fabricating the largest municipal screens in the world for the Village Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Birmingham, Alabama. Our case study this month goes for a visit to those screens now that they’ve been installed. We’ll show you through new drone footage how well they’re functioning, and you’ll read why the City’s operators are delighted to have made this long-term investment in the best screens on the market.
Summer is here in the Northern Hemisphere and that means vacations, relaxing in the sun, picnics, swimming, boating, hiking and, of course, reading those great books you’ve been meaning to get to. June 6th marks the 75th anniversary of D-Day. In honor of that heroic effort, there isn’t a better book to review this month than Antony Beevor’s D-Day. I haven’t finished the book yet, so the review is brief, but it is the right book for this month in so many ways. We honor all of the people who sacrificed their safety for the lives and future of others. I’ve included a photo of my father who, as I’m writing this newsletter, is attending a D-Day celebration here in Houston honoring WWII veterans, of whom I am proud to say my father is one. (Why am I not there, you wonder? I was meant to be out of town at a conference, so didn’t have a ticket. I did help Dad and Gerald with their bowties, though!)
We all have our heroes. People who have lived their lives in a way that inspires us to do better. I have several, including my father and Winston Churchill who top the list. So, I leave you with a link to one of Churchill’s many meaningful quotes, this one on his reflections on the value of following your conscience. It is what we try to do at Headworks day after day. It is what those heroes did on D-Day and the many days of war before and after the invasion. It is what my father taught me.
Until next month, we wish you the courage to follow your conscience wherever it leads.
Michele LaNoue
Headworks International Inc.
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Stainless steel screens over 100 feet long now in operation. See them here.
In December 2018, we wrote about the longest Multi-Rake Bar Screens we know to be installed anywhere and promised a follow up article. Headworks™ delivered to the Village Creek Wastewater Treatment Facility three Headworks MS1 Bar Screens with overall lengths of 102ft (31m), the largest one being 10.6ft (3.2m) wide. The photo here shows the screens discharging the collected solids into the existing dual conveyor followed by a compactor. The discharge chute selector allows it to be switched from one conveyor to the other.
At a recent visit, our Sr. VP Gerald Seidl personally observed their performance. The enormous length and overall size not only made the installation in 3 sections
a challenging task, it also required additional precautions in the design to account for their enormous weight and the impact of the water they would be subjected to during operation.
Various components were strengthened to withstand those forces and the stress created by the higher than usual horsepower and torque. Twenty-five years of experience with many large MS screens installed around the world provided us with the practical field experience to incorporate our practical insights into the Village Creek units.
As the pioneer of the modern Multi Rake Bar Screen and the fact that our home market is the US, we can draw on a body of experience no one in the industry can compare with. Inlet channels in the US are significantly deeper than anywhere else in the world. This unique market difference here in the States necessitated from the beginning that our engineers reinforce our MS bar screens to withstand a much more challenging environment. The aging infrastructure around the country, with crumbling sewer systems and lots of infiltration from underground water tables, requires the first defense of a wastewater plant to be more resilient to large flows and heavy solids than in most parts of the world. The result was the most robust screens in the industry.
Headworks also introduced to the wastewater market a significant capital improvement to their budgets, both capital and operations, by providing such a robust fine screen in one simple to operate unit that there was no longer a need for plants to purchase both a coarse and fine screen. With a laser-like focus on improving the operation of screening at plants and improvement of the protection to the overall downstream operations, Headworks became the leader in the screening industry early on, a position it holds to this day.
Brad Moore, the Village Creek Operator, summarized their experience with the Headworks MS1 screens:
“We’ve been running these new screens for over a year now. They don’t require nearly the amount of maintenance as the old ones. Also, we didn’t realize the amount of solids we weren’t capturing until we saw what all these bar screens were pulling out.”
Mr. Seidl brought his drone with him to Alabama and took some great video shots of these massive screens during his visit to Village Creek WWTP. Click this link to view our big babies yourself. Enjoy!
Headworks is the market leader in Deep Channel Screen applications and wants to help you with your application, big or small. Contact your local manufacturers’ representative or the experts at Headworks Inc. who are here to serve you at sales@headworksintl.com or +1.713.647.6667.
And that equates to over 4 years of flow at Niagara Falls, which you can see here.
Check out her review of Antony Beevor’s D-Day here.
D-DAY: THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY By Antony Beevor
Mr. Beevor, an award-winning author for his books which include Stalingrad, The Battle for Spain, The Fall of Berlin, and others, meticulously researched the history of the D-Day battle which launched in the largest amphibious assault in history. The book covers the period from the battle June 6, 1944, through the liberation of Paris on August 25th.
In recent years, as the soldiers who fought and survive in France have aged and passed away, their families have donated their diaries and letters to various libraries and archives, adding to the richness of this history. Beevor’s source documents also include interviews conducted by combat historians conducted just after the action.
This detailed book is the first major account of the battle written in more than 20 years. It is the first to cover not only the experiences of the Americans, British, Canadians, and Germans, but also the horrifying experiences of the French who were caught up inadvertently in the fighting. It is surprising to learn all of these 75 years later that more French citizens were killed by Allied shelling and bombing than British civilians by the Luftwaffe.
War is a terrible thing, no matter the cause. Reading D-Day brings to life what the liberation of France cost not only the individuals involved on all sides, but also the relationship between America and Europe for generations afterwards. It is a history that is a part of all of us and a legacy we would do well to understand and ponder.
Written in honor of my father, Machinist’s Mate Second Class (T) (CB) USNR Leonard LaNoue, who served in the Pacific during WWII in the US Navy’s Seabees.
Read his inspiring thoughts here.
History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all of this? The only guide to a man is his conscience. The only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.
Winston Churchill
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