It's a Dirty Job, and Here's How Fox Metro Does It

When it comes to certain things, I’m an out-of-sight, out-of-mind kind of guy.

I know that’s a bad quality for a reporter. I should be curious about everything. But it’s like this: when I flush the toilet, all I need to know is that it worked. Whatever I wanted to get rid of is now gone, and in its place is nice, clean water, and I can put the lid down and not think about it any more.

So it was with some trepidation that I accepted Matt Brolley’s invitation to tour the Fox Metro Water Reclamation District’s facility on Friday. Brolley, chairman of Montgomery’s Plan Commission (and a candidate for Village Board), had arranged the tour for village bigwigs and other area officials, all of them presumably fascinated by the chance to see what happens to your sewage once it leaves your house.

Me, I thought it might be Brolley's idea of an April Fool's Day joke. But I went anyway.

At the ungodly hour of 8:30 a.m. (I’m a reporter, we like to sleep in), I trudged out to Fox Metro’s 65-acre treatment plant off of Route 31 in Oswego. On hand for the tour were Montgomery’s village manager, Anne Marie Gaura; her assistant, Jamie Belongia; Planner Michael Brown; Community Development Director Jane Tompkins; and Plan Commission members Brolley and Steve Jungermann.

One thing you have to say for Fox Metro’s operation: it’s impressively vast. The district serves 300,000 residents, and covers 150 square miles. If you flush your toilet in Kane or Kendall counties, chances are it’s going right to Fox Metro. The executive director of the whole operation is Tom Muth, a soft-spoken man with a firm grasp on his subject.

Muth and his colleagues talk in their own language, a kind of code shared among water treatment professionals. I chuckled at a few of their terms: “iron sponge,” for instance, or “centrifuge cake.” (More on that one later.) But my favorite, by far, was “biosolids.” Yep, it means what you think it does.

I’ve actually started using that one at home. “Oh, look, the cat left me some biosolids. How nice."

Muth started us off in a meeting room with a slide projector, walking us through what we were about to see. Essentially, wastewater comes in one end, goes through a roughly 12-hour cleaning process, and gets pumped into the Fox River on the other end.

On an average day, Fox Metro can process 36 million gallons of wastewater. On a wet day, Muth said, that total can get up to 85 million. Why? Well, there are still areas in the district where the storm and sanitary sewers share the same pipes, and a heavy rain draining into those pipes will send all that water Fox Metro’s way.

Our tour began at the point where all that raw sewage arrives. We all piled into a brick structure with the ominous name of “The Grit Building,” and the smell was immediately overpowering. If I could present this part of the story to you, dear reader, in Smell-O-Vision, I would do it, because I won’t be able to describe the stench accurately. Let’s just say it was pretty bad.

Wastewater first goes to the Grit Building, where it is pumped through filters that remove sand and gravel. Then it gets dumped into the primary clarifiers, big tanks with giant, sweeping filters that separate the oils and, um, biosolids from the water. It takes a couple of hours, but 50 percent of those solids are removed in these tanks.

Oh, and they smell pretty bad, too.

Speaking of that smell, Muth said the district would be adding hydrogen peroxide to the mixture this spring. This is expected to cut down on the odor, which was good news for Brolley, who lives a few blocks away. When the wind is blowing north, he said, the smell is noticeable.

I asked him what direction the wind was blowing when he bought his home, and his reply was, "Not north."

From the primary clarifiers, the water heads to aeration tanks, where microorganisms are added to it. Basically, these little critters eat most of the biosolids left over, once the water heads to secondary clarifier tanks. Greg Buchner, the biosolids project manager, said this takes about five to seven hours.

And what becomes of the solids? Well, they’re scooped into centrifuges, where they’re dried out. The result is a black Jello-like product called “centrifuge cake,” which, yummy as it sounds, probably wouldn’t be a hit at your next birthday party. The methane gas that comes off of it is pumped out and stored in a massive tank, and then used to heat Fox Metro’s boilers.

As you can imagine, smoking is not allowed.

After a couple of weeks, the dried-out biosolids are removed, and given to local farmers for their fields. What Fox Metro can’t give away, they use on their own on-site farmland.

The water, on the other hand, is sent back into the river, with at least 98 percent of the contaminants removed.

All in all, the plant costs $29 million a year to run, Muth said. Fifteen years ago it was a much smaller operation, but the population of the district has doubled since 1990. (Montgomery alone has tripled its population in the last 10 years.) That’s a lot more biosolids to deal with.

Fox Metro’s vast operation is fascinating to behold. It runs 24 hours a day, and takes 80 people to pull it off. And God bless ‘em for doing it, because the two-hour tour was enough for me. Do I feel better knowing exactly what happens after I flush? I do, actually, and I have much more respect for the people who run Fox Metro. It’s a dirty job, but… well, you know.

Muth knows exactly how dirty it is. On the way out, he gave this piece of salient advice:

“Wash your hands,” he said. “You’ve been working with you-know-what.”