Partial lagoon cleanouts help balance performance and budgets

If you’re going to clean out a cell or two at your wastewater lagoon, there are circumstances when a partial cleanout might be the best, fastest way to quickly fix an urgent capacity or performance issue until the lagoon is ready for a full desludging.

Partial cleanouts, using the Bishop Solids Management Solution, can most often be completed while the lagoon remains in operation, so there’s no need to decommission the cell or disrupt the process flow. Bishop Water can quickly diagnose lagoon performance issues caused by excess sludge and determine the volume and locations of sludge that should be removed from the cell.

Once a plan is ready, the team can mobilise a dredge, its mobile polymer conditioning system and prepare a laydown area for Geotube® containers, are used to collect, dewater and consolidate the solids. Or, if the volume of sludge is small, they can be filled and removed inside 30-yard roll off boxes, making transportation and disposal fast and simple.

Partial sludge cleanouts can also become part of an ongoing lagoon maintenance program to ensure optimum performance. Rather than waiting until sludge accumulation reaches a critical level, lagoon operators or Bishop Water technicians can monitor sludge accumulation in the lagoon and when needed, proactively perform a partial cleanout to maintain an optimized level of performance.

Partial lagoon cleanouts have been used by many lagoon operators to achieve operational and economic benefits including:

• Quickly restore lost storage and treatment capacity in the lagoon;
• Correct flow issues caused by sludge accumulation that create short-circuiting of lagoon flow and reduced retention time;
• Defer the cost of a full lagoon cleanout over an extended period of time;
• Maximize the capacity and dewatering of each Geotube® container. Partially filled containers can remain onsite for continued filling at the next cleanout interval. They will experience significant volume reduction between fill intervals, which will reduce the number of containers needed as well as hauling and disposal costs.