Background
With a more than 65-year-old water treatment facility and a growing population, the City of Wichita decided to construct a new facility to treat multiple water sources ranging from 100% groundwater to 100% surface water. The new Northwest Wichita Water Facility allows the city to leverage its diverse water supply and operate in a flexible and sustainable manner based on climatic conditions.
The City of Wichita currently operates the Main Water Treatment Facility, which includes the Central Plant with a capacity of 130 million gallons per day (MGD) and the East Plant with a capacity of 30 MGD. Although the facility was partially rehabilitated and upgraded in 1992, the original plants are more than 65 years old and lack the necessary redundancies to provide resiliency and flexibility the city requires for a sustainable future.
With more than 550,000 residents to serve, the city set out to improve reliability. The process of rehabilitating the existing facility while maintaining treatment would be a costly project, so the city chose to construct a new facility. The site of the new Northwest Wichita Water Facility was chosen due to its proximity to the convergence of pipelines from the city’s two primary water sources: the Equus Beds Wellfield (groundwater) and the Cheney Reservoir (surface water).
Burns & McDonnell has been working in partnership with the City of Wichita on its water treatment infrastructure since the 1990s. This long-standing relationship meant our team was deeply familiar with critical aspects of this project.
Features
The Northwest Wichita Water Facility is one of the largest infrastructure projects the City of Wichita has undertaken, which makes stakeholder engagement a major component of our work. This project affects ratepayers; therefore, our team is helping stakeholders understand the importance of the project and the phases of work.
The new water treatment facility will treat multiple sources including groundwater, aquifer storage, recovery sourced water and surface water through a single treatment plant with multiple treatment schemes. This gives the city flexibility to switch between water sources depending on climatic condition, achieving the city’s goal of developing a diverse and sustainable water supply that serves more than a quarter of Kansas’ population. It will also provide the city with appropriately sized operations, laboratory, maintenance and administration spaces.