And It Comes Out Here...

Last Tuesday night, Steve Anderson of Water Remediation Technologies (WRT) presented a tour of our trace radium removal facility at Well #4 for members of the Elburn Village Board, and the press. The facility itself is as impressive, as it is simple.

Basically, municipal well water at 1000 gallons per minute filters through a giant vertical zeolite filled cylinder that captures and absorbs the infinitesimal levels of radium and barium from the water. This leaves the water itself unchanged, yet purified from the process. As part of its lease agreement with the village, employees from WRT will manage the spent media for us. Eventually, once contaminated, it will be removed and stored in a federally approved low level waste facility.

This may sound like overkill, but remember that radium removed from public water supplies with the ion exchange method or the lime softening method is simply released into our streams and rivers or tilled into our farm fields.

Frankly, if the Federal government says that trace levels of radium is too dangerous to drink, then what are we doing spewing that same level of radium all over the environment?

The lime softening method was estimated to cost over $14 million for Elburn to implement. Ion exchange would have cost us over $7 million. The WRT zeolite process cost Elburn less than $2 million to implement, and thanks to a $500,000 grant obtained on our behalf by Speaker Dennis Hastert, we were able to fund the capital costs of this project with no loans.

Our radium removal facilities at Well #3 and Well #4 have passed their bacteriological tests. We are adjusting each of the units, and they should both be online soon. The radium removal unit for Well #5 at Blackberry Creek is being installed by the developer, and it too, should be completed by midyear. With a little luck, by August, 2006, this entire issue of trace levels of radium in our water will be a distant memory.

Of all of the issues I have faced as mayor, I believe this one was the most difficult. I didn't know how we were going to solve this mandate without making our municipal water rates increase exponentially. I am so proud of our village board and engineers, and their willingness to drop everything to evaluate a new technology. The savings for all of us are substantial today, and will continue far into the future.