Desal water could begin flowing early next month

After missing deadlines and encountering mechanical snags, the plant is finally ready.

By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published February 25, 2003

CLEARWATER -- Tampa Bay Water's $110-million desalination plant is still not producing drinking water, but it's getting close, the regional utility's operations manager told board members Monday.

The membranes that screen salt out of the water taken from Tampa Bay finally got wet for the first time last Wednesday.

But minor mechanical glitches have slowed progress toward the goal of producing clean water for consumption, said Ken Herd, Tampa Bay Water's engineering and projects manager.

The desal plant, which will be the largest in the Western Hemisphere, was supposed to be finished by Jan. 31. Its builders, Covanta Water Systems, had talked of finishing a month early -- only to notify Tampa Bay Water officials in mid-December that they needed another 123 days and $1.8-million.

Officials of the utility, which serves 2-million consumers, cut the money demand back to $500,000 and set up a schedule that called for the plant to produce 3-million gallons of water a day by Feb. 6. But Covanta missed that deadline too.

Before last week, the holdup was the filtration system that protects the plant's 10,000 membranes.

The plant is set up to filter impurities out of the water, taken from the outfall of Tampa Electric Co.'s Big Bend power plant next door, before it goes to the membranes to remove the salt.

Covanta and Tampa Bay Water officials were tinkering with that filtration system, trying to make the water as pure as possible before it gets to the expensive membranes.

Herd said the plant finally achieved sufficient purity to get water to the membranes last week. But then a pump went out and a power surge shut the whole plant down. Now those mechanical glitches have been ironed out too, he said.

Herd said it is possible Covanta may hit the next deadline in its contract, which calls for producing 12-million gallons a day by March 4, "but it's going to be very challenging to do that."

Instead, he said, it is more likely Covanta will be ready to produce 3-million gallons a day by then.

Because of the delays Covanta owes Tampa Bay Water 108-million gallons of free water, which the utility will claim pretty quickly once the plant is in operation, said Tampa Bay Water attorney Don Conn.

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