Wolfforth One Step Closer to Solution for Cleaning Up City's Water
By: Meredith Hillgartner
Updated: February 19, 2013
"It'll take a lot of money to do it," Newsom said. "So the whole price tag is a little bit more than six million dollars."
Wolfforth City Manager Darrell Newsom is talking about cleaning up the cities water.
"It's been in here for a test mode for about 30 days so we have about another 60 days for this to be completed," Newsom said.
In July 2011 the city of Wolfforth was warned by the environmental protection agency to clean up the arsenic levels in their water.
They are trying to do that through electro dialysis reversal.
"Here we are actually using electricity to remove anything that has a positive electron or negative electron," Adams said. "It's going to remove that out of the water."
Michael Adams is the lead engineer on the project.
He said the idea has been in place long before their warning from the EPA.
"We've been looking at this since 2007," Adams said. "That's when we first looked at it with the whole goal in mind is conservation."
And saving water is a big deal here in West Texas.
The elector dialysis reversal conserves about 90% of the water it tests where something like reverse osmosis only saves about 75%.
"In the larger scale you are looking at using 100,000 gallons a day and you're only going to send 10,000 gallons to waste versus 25,000 or 30,000," Adams said.
Neighboring cities like Smyer and Meadow are also looking into the technology but said they don't have the funds for the multi-million dollar project.
But Newsom said the results are worth the money.
"We're doing a lot of things for the long term health and safety for the city of Wolfforth," Adams said.
