The Kalamazoo Water Reclamation Plant, or sewer plant, celebrated its 70th anniversary Thursday. The event allowed guests to visit the disc filter building, which is the newest feature of the plant. The filters help to clean the wastewater.
James Baker is the city’s public service director. He says in the water and wastewater industry, facilities need to stay up to date.
"We got to make sure that we're doing projects in time, and we're bringing those investments on early enough. So that we, if we've got facilities that are aging, we can take those facilities off so that we're never compromising the effluent and so that we're continuing to protect the environment," he said.
The city says the plant has been operating around the clock since its opening in 1955. Before that, raw sewage and industrial waste went directly into the Kalamazoo River, which was heavily polluted.
“At one time the river was actually proposed to be designated an industrial river, which meant it would have been dedicated to serving as a waste repository,” author Dave Dempsey told WMUK in 2018.
