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There’s more to wastewater than meets the nose

White toilet bowl in a bathroom
Africa Studio - stock.adobe.com
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White toilet bowl in a bathroom

The Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District uses a certain byproduct to measure how many people are visiting Summit County. It may not smell good, but it’s accurate.

The Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District uses a certain byproduct to measure how many people are visiting Summit County. It may not smell good, but it’s accurate.

There’s a lot a community can learn from its water, such as upticks in COVID numbers. The Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District, created in 1973 and covering Park City and the surrounding areas, collects wastewater data from nearly 11,000 homes and businesses. The last few months reflect an uptick, not in COVID, but in tourism.

District Director Mike Luers says the SBWRD uses the number of toilet flushes to determine how many visitors are in town.

“So once a month, we calculate what we call the flush index. And this is simply a calculation. That where we use wastewater flows to estimate the number of people in town, and particularly, we use the metric of visitor nights. So for the month of March, we estimated that there were 550,675 visitor nights. And we'd like to compare that to a year ago. So in this case, it was 8.4% decrease. Now, while we had a decrease in March, for the year, we're still up about 10% based on wastewater flows.

Luers says the process is more involved than just a simple flush and comes down to a sophisticated calculation.

“It’s actually fairly complex, it involves actual gallons of wastewater, the strength of wastewater, how much water seeps into the system from rain and snow melt. And then we also correlate that with historical numbers from the Chamber of Commerce. So it's quite an elaborate statistical model. And we've been doing this for over I think, like 15 years now. And statistically, our estimates are very, very close to the numbers that will eventually come from the Chamber of Commerce.”

Behind the scenes and under the ground of the wastewater process is hundreds of miles of pipeline and pumpstations to get the wastewater to treatment facilities.

In 2016 the Silver Creek water reclamation facility located near Home Depot was torn down and rebuilt to improve the level of treatment. It was a three-year project completed in 2019. Luers says with the unforeseeable growth of the area, it’s time to expand the East Canyon facility located in Jeremy Ranch by adding several million gallons of capacity with a two-phase project and a price tag of $111,000,000.

“So that portion of the Silver Creek facility that's paid for by existing customers, that's just through their monthly sewer bill that's already built into the fee. This new project at East Canyon, again, is being paid for by new development, and that'll be paid through impact fees..”

To learn more about water, where it comes from and how it’s used, a water symposium is being held on May 2nd at 5:30 at the Park City Hospital in the Blair Education Center.