Salt Lake City Airport Construction Project – Keeping The Water Clean

With any large-scale project there are bound to be bumps along the way, but for the Salt Lake City team, water treatment was one of the biggest challenges they’ve faced. As one of the largest construction projects in the state of Utah, the airport had exceedingly high standards that required daily on-demand service at a moment’s notice.

The average flow rate of ground water recharge measured 2,000 to 3,000 gallons per minute and was then pumped through our 18,000-gallon open-top weir tank. Any water negatively impacted by petroleum byproducts was pumped through activated carbon vessels, then into another Ironclad open-top tank to test for: total dissolved solids, diesel- and gasoline-ranged organic hydrocarbons, pH levels, VOCs, and TCLP prior to discharge into storm drain systems.

Pumping and treating water contaminated with raw pure fuel was a particularly daunting task. During excavations there could be up to two feet of standing jet fuel on top of the ground water that needed to be captured prior to pumping. And water that was already pumped into the tanks needed to be skimmed before filtration.

In addition to compromised fuel lines and surrounding petroleum contamination, the lines themselves were encased with an outer lining of friable asbestos, creating yet another environmental hurdle to overcome. And of course, in the midst of these challenges the airport had to remain operational at all times, requiring a secondary, temporary fuel system in order to fuel planes throughout construction.