A Year After Sandy, Wastewater Plant Power Upgrades Announced

Although Howard County managed to weather Superstorm Sandy well in October 2012, there was a major exception.

About 20 million gallons of wastewater flowed unabated into the Little Patuxent River for 12 hours as county and BGE officials rushed to restore a power outage at the Little Patuxent Water Reclamation Plant in Savage. Fallen trees caused the outage when they knocked out the low hanging 'redundant' power lines attached to the plant.

County Executive Ken Ulman stood at the site that day in 2012, addressing reporters, and said the county needed more reliable power at the plant.

On Monday, exactly one year after the storm hit, Ulman unveiled the new plan to ensure that a spill of that magnitude doesn't happen again.

The new $8.1 million electrical system that will be installed is composed of three massive diesel generators capable of producing 2.5 kilowatts of electrical power each, that can be switched on if the facility loses power; and 15,000 square feet of new solar panels installed on the roofs of buildings capable of producing 287,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity for the plant each year, according to the Howard County Times.

Ulman said the solar panels "will generate power that will be supplied to the plant 24/7 and it will more than offset the carbon used by the generators, even if the generators had to be used for two major events in a year, which we hope they are not."

Steve Gerwin, chief of the county's bureau of utilities, described the "monstrous" generators as "reliable technology." He said one generator could power the plant on a typical day and during severe weather it would take two.

The plant's previous backup generators powered the plant for about 15 minutes, said officials at the time of the spill last year.

"We've now invested in this plant," said Ulman, "invested in the tools that we need to keep this going, so we don't have to rely on anyone else, but ourselves to keep this up and running."

The wastewater plant serves central Howard County and handles waste from about 56 percent of the county's population, according to the plant's website. Wastewater is carried to the plant through sewer pipes, where it undergoes a treatment process.