Apprenticeship is the only way, but you need books to help pass the exams.

Sacramento State courses were at one time considered the best: https://owp.csus.edu/operator-training/courses/correspondence-courses/wastewater-courses/course.php?sectionId=1947&has_child_courses=1

I'm even if they aren't considered great anymore, doing the correspondence course which costs $50 and is a series of online multiple choice questions gives you 90 training hours towards your renewal requirements which is more than two years worth here.

I understand operators these days prefer the WEF manuals: https://www.wef.org/... Perhaps they kept up with the standard exams better.

On the engineering side I love the WEF MOP, especially MOP 8: https://connect.wef.org/...

We joke that Metcalf and Eddy is our bible but it's the most basic starting point in research. I think people take the joke too literally sometimes:

https://www.mheducation.com/...

Sorry, I have wastewater autism: direct potable reuse (turning sewage into drinking water) is super rare and they def don't do that at NEORSD.

Almost every time I give a tour someone says something like that and I have to explain sewage is treated and put back into the water body, then a different plant takes the water, treats it, and puts it in the water pipes. (Yes that's just for surface water, but same idea for septic/wells)

I've never had the pleasure beyond a simple snake, but when I studied for my wastewater collections licences we had to memorize the names of the tools. Here is an assortment for laterals:

There is so much behind that seems like such a simple task. Very cool pictures, thanks for sharing!

You might just be venting but:

If you are actually interested in development applications in Ottawa and why they are rejected, that info is available in the development application search on the City of Ottawa website. Look in "post application" as the status.

The story is the same across Ontario. Applications for amendments to the Official Plans so developers can build outside of places that have established infrastructure. Strong mayor powers don't magically make sewers appear where there aren't any.

The Official Plan is public and shows developers where they can build based on available infrastructure capacity. Developers who own land outside these areas make an application and changes to the planning act mean the province will likely approve these applications (at the Ontario Planning Board) and force cities to try and catch up with infrastructure. Oh, and they force cities to lower development fees so there is no money to build it either.

Something to think about when you read about the undersized infrastructure in Ottawa over the next few days.

(Also this isn't new, it's about the pushback the new powers got during consultation. It came into force May 1, 2025).

No and yes.

Most regulations are based on the assimilation capacity of the receiving body which is nerd talk for "how much pollution the water can take before it starts showing signs of harm". So you treat to that, nature does a bit more, and then the drinking water plant takes water from an ideal place.

Most wastewater plants just speed up nature.

The history of centralized treatment is super fascinating because it centred on what the problems were when it was established (very late 1800-early 1900s) whereas drinking water treatment really has changed more to deal with how our understanding of human health has changed. They don't really match up!

You can put the water plant at the end of the sewage plant for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEWater but yeah the water body does some of the treatment too.

I don't agree with that take.

https://duckduckgo.com/...

We rely on publicly available lists to filter out AI-generated content, like those provided by uBlockOrigin & uBlacklist Huge AI Blocklist, an open-source blocklist, manually curated by project contributors.

This is an open source block list, which is manually put together by volunteers. It's not even reading metadata, presumably because that's too resource intensive (or proprietary/unreliable).

Gemini was able to tell that was AI because it was able to read the image ID water mark and associated it with how Adobe sequences AI generated images. The image ID is in the file name, but if we wanted to catch it that way the filter would need to work on logic, not just keywords or site lists. Programming a filter to search the file names to identify if it belonged to the sequence would be more complex.

Alternatively, if you clicked though to the image you are immediately told if it is AI. Whenever I search for microbe photos I always click the source to determine if it's a render or a stylized electron microscope capture, and I figure it's always been good practice to get the image from the source to verify it's not totally bullshit either in terms of the the search pulling up something unrelated or the image itself being misleading or even a humorous misrepresentation/meme.

I think it's important to understand how the tools we rely on work.

The new order comes amid several reported cyberattacks on U.S. water systems, which officials suspect have links to Iran, according to The New York Times.

I know the article isn't saying it's the same, but I wanted to add a clarification that the FBI had said the attacks were only noted in Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), specifically MicroLogix 1100 and 1400 series.

After remotely accessing internet-facing devices, the actors changed the IP addresses and passwords, resulting in a loss of monitoring and control functionality.

There have been PLC attacks that resulted from a compromised device being installed but these appear to be about poor security practices.

Someone is in TROUBLE:

At least one organization reported modified PLC project files after noticing ladder logic discrepancies across several sites.

There is literally a physical key you have to turn to change the program. For example:

I'm not sure I understand, are you thinking they are all AI? At least some of them are not - I recognize them from the before times. Tardigrade images have always been goofy looking.

The adobe stock images are AI though. It's probably a safe bet to avoid stock image sites although Alamy seems to have some good ones. Adding the photography filter helps a bit too, but I still got some stock images used on other websites.

Ironically, AI can tell me the adobe images are AI and why they don't get flagged in image search:

Yes, this image is AI-generated.

While checking the image file shows it was not made using Google AI tools specifically, it bears the official "Adobe Stock" watermark directly over an image ID (961863094) that belongs to Adobe's generative AI collection.

When downloaded directly from the official Adobe Stock platform, the full-resolution file contains embedded metadata acknowledging it as AI content, but this background data is lost when saving or extracting the preview image.

I'm not saying laterals have no nutrients, but the concentration and type of nutrients are very different between laterals and septic tanks.

Sewage in laterals is pretty dilute. Septic tanks (the tank, not the drain fields) are where the solids collect. They break down a bit over time and particulate forms of nutrients become soluble and more easily taken up by plants.

The sewage in the fields is also generally more strong than sewage that goes to municipal or shared systems because it's passing though the tank and taking up some of those newly solubilized nutrients on the way to the field.

The tree is absolutely going to get less water when it's repaired, but I'd be doubtful that the nutrient level will change all that much.

Thank you shark fucker 420! You will be pleased to know that I'm not even that unique among the turd herders. Plenty of us are 'eccentric'.

The city doesn't decide if they get a hydro hookup, BC Hydro does. The city could approve the zoning and BC Hydro could be like, nah.

Fun fact (?): The Thames being so gross is one of the reasons modern sewage treatment took off. One of the main tests is designed based on the behavior of the Thames: https://dnr.wisconsin.gov/...

Fair, the adobe ones are labeled as AI if you click through to the link so that's a pretty big miss in the search.

Edit: I retract my misinformed comment, I hadn't looked at how the filter works.

Stock images have always included bullshit renders of microbes so maybe that's just something I take for granted.

The more the merrier.

Yes...someday...

It has been clarified that the hookup wasn't without the knowledge of the utility, it was a failure of a new transmitter/verifying they were getting readings.

https://thecitizen.com/...

I work in this realm and as soon as I read the quotes from the utility in the first batch of articles it was immediately clear that people who didn't have all the information were responding to inquiries. Your average utility employee, even in admin functions have zero media training. If I had a penny for every time I had to deal with the fallout of some ambitious comment that was taken out of context by the media or public, I'd have several pennies.

The operation, run by Pennsylvania-based Ag-Grid Energy, is the first of its kind in the country. The company claims the anaerobic digestion of manure and food waste could be a game-changer, not only in powering crypto, but data centers, which currently use 4.9% of the country’s electricity, a figure that could double by 2030.

There are a handful of net energy producing waste treatment processes in the world, and they all achieve it by taking advantage of hyper local opportunities to optimize. They are not infinitely scalable. For example, T. PARK in China takes sludge from several wastewater plants and uses the energy to power one of them.

Further, it is not truly net positive if it leaves residuals that need further treatment.

The project claims to recycle more than 45,000 gallons of food waste per day and the manure of 4,000 cows. “What we want to do is also provide, if possible through fiber optics, [the] value of the AI computing capacity to that same regional area,” Akki says.

The energy isn't in the manure. Wastewater plants use food waste (co-digestion) to boost methane production of digesters. Some places get the food waste from a municipal green bin program but that's a giant pain and wastewater plants tend to prefer food waste from food manufacturing. So it's unclear if this is diverting the food waste from landfill. The best solution would be to reduce the food waste in the first place. Can you call it green if it is the result of over production?

Don't get me wrong, I am pro-biogas. In municipal wastewater treatment the best results for biogas production come when you direct as much short chain carbon to the digester, which greatly reduces one of the highest electrical loads on the plant (blowers to oxidize carbon).

You're still burning it though. It looks good on paper because the CO2 emissions don't count in Canadian GHG reporting because the source is biogenic. Doesn't change the fact that there are emissions.

The digested waste, or digestate, is meant to be recycled, potentially into a range of products, such as fertilizer and animal bedding.

The energy to turn digestate into a fertilize product is pretty massive. Many of the plants that are energy neutral incinerate and the ash is landfilled.

Digested manure can be more polluting than manure that hasn’t been digested, according to USDA research.

Eeeehhhhh... Technically true but only because people are allowed to operate digesters poorly. I was talking to an engineer in the states who told me his digester was losing 30% of the methane by leaks and I was sitting getting second hand panic but apparently that's not super illegal? We would have problems with the environmental regulators and the TSSA.

The project intended to send about 41,000 gallons of waste per day into a tributary of Walla Walla Creek, which empties into Lake Michigan.

Excuse me what

There are some high level engineering plans available.

Some highlights:

• daily food waste estimated to be 225 tonnes and it may require on site processing.
• less than half of the digester feed will be manure.
• Digesters are mesophilic meaning they need to be heated to and maintained at ~35 C
• heat for the digester is provided by burning fuel oil 🙃 (most municipal plants burn the biogas)
• gas upgrading is by chilling, filtering and compressing for transport via pipeline. No mention of energy demands.
• the project would add runoff capture for manure storage which didn't exist before.
• the manure needs to be pretreated before digestion to remove sand
• the project agreement means Vanguard is not responsible for the waste products after the gas is removed.
• the project will create waste with more nutrients than the farm can land apply on their site. (You know, due to the additional food waste). There are therefore no details about what the plan is for the digestate.
• based on a news article it sounded like they wanted to build a pipeline to transport it to other farms for land application. That might be where the waste to the creek idea came from? The pipeline was to go under the creek. Maybe that was just if it broke?
• the enclosed engineering drawings are civil/structural only, no indication of power demand or fuel consumption.

There is also an air pollution permit application available. Additional details about the project include

• two 750 kw emergency generators (diesel powered)
• two natural gas boilers at 4 MMBTU/hr (unclear if this is instead of the fuel oil in the other doc?)
• the pressure relief system was to have a flare, which is positive. It is better to flare gas in an energy versus just venting.

The nutrient management permit application is behind a log in so I can't see it but this article has statements from Vanguard that contradict the engineering plans.

Hanselman says the company never uses human waste in its digesters, which is how PFAS would enter the equation and that the sources of the other organic food waste would likely be byproducts from dairy processing and beer brewing.

The application included provisions for accepting packaged food. The packaging is where the pfas is.

The process Vanguard’s co-digesters use to clean the digestate on the back end, Hanselman says, allows for nutrients to be removed and taken away. That allows the farm to limit the amount of phosphorus and nitrogen that is spread on the farm’s land. He noted that at the company’s first project in Vermont, they’re removing 12 tons of phosphorus per day from the environment.

This is explicitly untrue for the Waupaca project? Vanguard has no part in digestate treatment. Sometimes there is phosphorus removal during H2S removal (if FeCl is used) but this project used a scrubber. So no nutrient reduction.

I obviously can't speak for every project, but this example project would increase the amount of nutrients the farm has to manage (because of the trucked in food waste). It would increase energy consumption, and there was no plan for what to do with the digestate. It's not even clear if there is a net methane release reduction over their previous methods because the carbon in the food is more likely to convert to methane in the digester. The more slow to break down carbon from the manure may still end up on fields.

Food waste digestion needs a less biodegradable feed stock to make the process more stable. In municipal wastewater you balance raw sludge (easily digestible) and secondary sludge (less easily digestible) to ensure the acetogenisis step doesn't poison the methanogens step.

I don't see a benefit to the local community in this proposal at all. If they treated the wastewater using energy efficient methods then maybe? But not this project as it was proposed. Vanguard gets the slowly biodegradable material, land to use, to be absolved of responsibility to deal with byproducts. Seems like a bad deal.

I think it was more than likely an innocent mistake. I'm sure we've all misinterpreted things in the past. It's also possible I am mistaken. I'm not in their brain and I might have misread it too.

Like I said, I reached out to the author. If they get back to me and it turns out I was wrong I will correct it here.