Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Serving Clovis, Portales and the Surrounding Communities
Portales waste water plant Foreman Chris Cordova, far right, shows Portales High School students where water flows to at the treatment plant Friday afternoon during a tour. Cordova told the students that the plant goes through two filtering steps with a disinfecting step at the end.
PORTALES — The water that comes from the Portales wastewater plant is cleaner than almost any other water in eastern New Mexico, according to plant Foreman Chris Cordova.
Cordova educated Portales High School students on Friday as he explained to them that the new water plant makes the roughly 707,000 gallons of water it sends out per day twice as clean as the old plant was able to through a two-step filtering process that includes disinfection.
The water that leaves the plant is almost clean enough to drink, said Cordova, saying that the plant's process takes the NTU measurement in the water — the measurement of the amount of effluent, or bad stuff, in the water - from over 600 down to anywhere from 1.49 to 4 NTUs.
"The same water you pull out of the tap is the same water that was here when the dinosaurs were," Cordova told the students, adding that Earth recycles water naturally but the plant takes it through a stronger cleaning process to make it reusable for watering parks and more.
Public Works Director John DeSha said the plant is now using a process called "activated sledge" where the plant controls the entire treatment process as opposed to before when mother nature treated the water.
"The plant is producing water that is very, very clean and very safe, but it was never designed to be drinking water," he said. "We're taking as much of the organic material out of it as we can. The water that's been cleaned, goes out into that pond (at the plant), and we filter and chlorinate it before we send it out."
