Partial lagoon cleanouts help balance performance and budgets
DATE POSTED: July 30, 2019
You might think that if you’re going to cleanout a cell or two of your wastewater lagoon, it’s best to do it all at once. But there are circumstances when a partial clean out might be the best way to quickly fix an urgent capacity or performance issue until the lagoon is ready for a full desludging.
Partial clean outs, 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 mobilize a dredge, its mobile polymer conditioning system and prepare a laydown area for Geotube® containers, which 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 clean outs 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 clean out 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 clean out 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 clean out 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.
Contact us to learn more about the Bishop Solids Management Solution and to discuss your lagoon clean out needs.