Major Maintenance Complete at City of Dallas’ Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant
Gresham Smith is proud to announce that major maintenance and rehabilitation improvements to the City of Dallas’ Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant are complete. The firm identified, prioritized and built consensus for the projects that drove the greatest value for the City’s budget, ultimately designing upgrades for 14 critical pieces of infrastructure. The improvements promote operational efficiencies, add flexibility and increase reliability and redundancy for the City.
“The Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant is a critical piece of infrastructure needed to support the City of Dallas’ continued growth. As our team approached these maintenance and rehabilitation improvements, we looked at how we could best address today’s capacity needs and regulatory requirements while also helping the City be more adaptable and flexible in the future,” said Chris Kaakaty, P.E., Senior Vice President at Gresham Smith. “We were proud to use our expertise in wastewater operation and treatment to design critical upgrades that will serve the City for years to come.”
Partnering with plant operators, maintenance workers and other personnel, the Gresham Smith team relied heavily on the perspectives of those involved in the day-to-day operations when prioritizing and designing the upgrades. The improvements include, but are not limited to, repairs to the influent pump station gates, upgrades to the gravity belt thickeners, new variable frequency drives for critical influent and effluent pumping facilities, a new chlorine/SO2 scrubber system, and a new plant-wide hot water loop system.
Since the upgrades touched nearly every process in the plant, Gresham Smith partnered with the City of Dallas Water Utilities to develop detailed sequencing plans to successfully maintain plant operations during construction.
In addition to the maintenance upgrades, construction will soon start on Gresham Smith-designed stormwater improvements at the Southside Wastewater Treatment Plant. The improvements include 10 tasks related to plant-wide challenges, including drainage improvements, stormwater management through pump stations, and additional miscellaneous mechanical improvements related to process/mechanical components. The improvements, which are intended to alleviate localized flooding and mitigate current and future stormwater flows, are slated to complete in 2022.