VINEYARD, Utah — A new facility in Vineyard has officials claiming it will help connect local communities with several sources of drinking water they’ve never been able to use before.
A new source of water seems hard to believe, but it's true.
The facility managed by the Central Utah Water Conservancy District is part of a vision formed more than two decades ago.
“Water is… it’s a limited resource. We need to plan into the future and plan accordingly to ensure that we can meet the growing demand," said agency project manager Shaun Hilton.
The district made a $100 million bet on purchasing the water rights from Geneva Steel after the plant went bankrupt. But in the years since, that purchase hasn’t reached its full potential.
“We had several wells that we didn’t feel comfortable sending to the distribution system,” said Hilton.
That's because seven of the 11 groundwater wells around Vineyard were filled with high levels of naturally occurring iron and manganese.
Treating water as a commodity could get more farmers to send water to Great Salt Lake:
But in this rapidly growing area, officials needed a way to ensure clean water for the future.
“If we went another couple years, we wouldn’t have been able to meet that demand,” Hilton said.
The water polishing plant, which opened on Tuesday, will make all 11 of the wells usable and provide over 100,000 homes with reliable water.
“The untreated well water is run through the pressure filtration vessels and runs through filter media that removes the iron and manganese," explained district Assistant General Manager Mike Whimpey.
The plan will process up to 76 million gallons of water a day. Although the facility was formally unveiled Tuesday, it has been functioning for the past 4-5 weeks, serving customers across northern Utah County and southern Salt Lake County.
“Every drop of water has become critical for the public, for the environment,” Whimpey added.
Amid an especially dry year, district officials are proud to help Utahns tap into more of that precious resource.
“It’s one of the joys of being a civil engineer," said Hilton, "and being able to serve the population in that way."
