There is at least one used condom too (sorry)

Thank u 4 ur service 🫡

Hello. Please be introduced to the concept of poop tomatoes, something that pops up in wastewater plants. In warmer climates we see more poop watermelons.

It’s not just tomatoes or watermelons but those are the ones that seem to “make it” to being full plants so that’s what people remember. I’d bet on chia for this bad boy.

Putting some photos behind a spoiler tag because I have no idea what is considered decent vs gross anymore

I like what I like!

I’m not saying this happening is okay, but the lack of context about the volume can be misleading. Rules are different in Manitoba but in Ontario plants need to notify the public when there is a spill, which is why I imagine it’s made the news before any details are available. The idea is to inform downstream water users as soon as possible.

10 millions litres is 5% of average daily flow. It’s a very small amount, and the pollition load would be similar to a few days of totally treated sewage.

This article has a bit more info on what happened: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/winnipeg-sewage-spill-treatment-plant-9.7407843

Two automated bypass gates at the North End sewage treatment plant opened unexpectedly at about 1:10 a.m., … “We are still investigating why the gates opened and why the first alarm did not go off.”

I want to be clear I’m not criticising anyone. The fact that they caught it so quickly is honestly amazing. I’ve seen similar issues (that didn’t involve a spill to the environment) go undetected for like, months, because someone assumed the instrument was faulty and didn’t bother to verify.

My pessimistic self wonders if the owners/users of these freezers even know they are in the internet 😭

Literally more secure than the (now patched) access to the freezers:

https://ironhackers.es/en/danfoss-ak-sm-800a-cve-2025-41450/

I’m having trouble finding the one I’m thinking about (it was written for some industry org, maybe OWWA or OPWA?

Anyways, here is a comprehensive history, but it’s 181 pages: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2273818

I’ll comment again if I find the other one. I’m sure I have it saved somewhere 😅

TL;DR: Ottawa would have sooner built an aqueduct from 31-Mile Lake than build a sewage plant. They didn’t get one until the 1960s. Toronto built it’s first (and poorly working) municipal plant in 1912 (I think?). The chief bacteriologist in Ottawa was just like, throw some chlorine at the water, you will be fine. 😬

Yeah so that exists and it’s not going so well for the UK. I will edit with some links.

Edit:

Very broadly water utilities in the UK and north America largely started off private but public ownership is still the norm for centralized system of idk > 100 people?

Tbh I’m high and not bothering to look stuff but but I’m guessing that it was sewage treatment which lead water utilities (handling both potable and sewage) being public. You can charge people for water, but unless the government is forcing people to connect to a sewer and get rid of pit latrines etc there is no market for it. (Fun fact domestic connections to sewers predate the widespread use of septic tanks)

Migration to urban centres due to industrialization and the industrial processes themselves were the main loading of sewage, which overwhelmed natural systems that had previously been able to support the community.

Someone had to treat the sewage because it was fucking up the drinking water. Who has to deal with stuff like that? The government! So they run the sewage plants. And because the private drinking water plants were run for profit and not for health, a lot of them were extremely bad they got shut down. Once again, the government had to step in because they needed to enforce standards.

Toronto and Ottawa have very interesting and very divergent experiences with that relationship. If someone is interested I can see if I can dig up an article someone wrote about it.

Anyways, sometimes the government made developers pay directly for the construction, operations and maintenance of a plant, but now in Ontario for the most part they just charge development fees. Small communities like trailer parks or ski villages typically have their own little plant or over glorified septic tank.

I came here to argue that there are in fact private sewage companies and they are often disasters, but I think the above kind of proved that the origin of public water utilities was the failure of the private sector to get their shit together.

Well that’s awkward.

Anyways, fuck Thames Water : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water

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/publications/operator-training-manuals/ 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/s/store#/store/browse/detail/a2nRP000000oa6jYAA

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/highered/product/wastewater-engineering-treatment-and-resource-recovery-metcalf-and-eddy.html?viewOption=student

The research article is behind a paywall, but it makes it sound like this isn’t something that has been considered by these plants currently.

“Regional facilities rarely coordinate their decadal capital improvement plans or monthly operations because independent agencies monitor them and issue separate discharge permits,” said study senior author Meagan Mauter, a Stanford professor of civil and environmental engineering.

This is not true in this particular case, where there is a watershed level permit and a regulatory requirement for the formation of a consortium:

https://bacwa.org/

BACWA is a joint powers agency, formed under the California Government Code by the five largest wastewater treatment agencies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I’m really wondering what was meant by this:

Several Bay Area utilities are in conversations about forming a regional coordination effort, according to Abi Farraj, but most are waiting for regulators to approve an official coordination framework before committing.

It could be about the Water Quality Trading initiative, specifically, as obviously they have a regional coordination effort already!

https://bacwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BACWA_Final_Nutrient_Reduction_Report.pdf

https://bacwa.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/TFT-Report-BACWA-WQT-Feasibility-Final_12.31.2025.pdf

(To be clear, the flow isn’t getting shifted, it’s the “load” or kg/day discharge of the nutrients. That’s why shifting is possible. The plants aren’t connected.)

Yes, this is a useful tool. It’s hard to justify decisions without costs, and it’s true that it is a very hard thing to estimate how doing something at one plant can save money at another if you look at them in isolation.

But the plants are not looked at in isolation in many utilities. There are often master planning documents for utilities as a whole and/or watersheds as a whole, with individual documents for the individual plants with more details. The BACWA and total water body loading limit isn’t a new concept. In fact, the reason I know about watershed level planning is the amazing work by the Grand River Conservation Authority: https://www.grandriver.ca/our-watershed/water/wastewater/

The abstract for the paper doesn’t mention participation by the BACWA, which is something that I find annoying at times. I’ve seen papers published on plants I’ve worked at where the author’s never contacted us and their papers contain errors in fact about the plant or process. I don’t know enough to say that is what happened here, and it doesn’t make the work less valuable as a general concept but researchers: please come talk to us! We can help!

It really sucks to talk to a student about their work and to hear that they didn’t realize they could reach out. I understand the PI might have given them a project to tackle without any context, and that being exactly 1-to-1 with the real world isn’t the point, but I still think it does the students disservice in keeping them separated from the practical side. It’s hard for academics to break into industry afterwards, especially without those contacts and exposure.

Okay…putting away the soapbox.

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!

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:

It’s not that simple.

Drinking water comes from three reservoirs: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/reservoir-levels-water-use

• Capilano
• Seymour
• Coquitlam

Only the Coquitlam dam is impacted by hydro use: https://metrovancouver.org/services/water/watersheds-reservoirs

The water use planning for Coquitlam can be seen here: https://www.bchydro.com/toolbar/about/sustainability/environmental_responsibility/water-use-plans/lower-mainland/coquitlam-buntzen.html

The diversion for drinking water (MVWD) is downstream the power houses, meaning drinking water diversion is limited by power generation. Further, this station is used for auxillary and peaking because they are not efficient/old.

Sidenote: the trails at the Capilano reservoir are magical ✨ I ended up there by accident a few years back and nwas blown away. Accessible by public transit too!

Hold on… A few things stand out to me.

Why do you think they want people to buy energy? (Regulated)Hydro companies always want people to conserve electricity because it means they don’t need to be constantly upgrading the transmission grid.

Secondly, what would they be diverting water to? Who is they? Hydro may physically control the dams and valves but if you are saying the water needs to go to the data centre when the water is going to come from Metro Van water department, in which case the city does get a say because development is only approved if there is enough capacity. If the data centre is using a lot of water, so much so that it will impact HydroBC in terms of lower reservoirs, it’s going to be a massive demand in the city run water service.

If you have questions about how these things are controlled I’d be happy to help answer them using the public documents from these utilities.

Hydro supplies the water?

Sorry, I was wrong in assuming this was an error. I didn’t realize overuse of reservoirs was a factor in the capacity.

But I don’t understand which way you think they will lean?

Sure you could take a sentence in a reply explaining a very specific scenario and apply it to every situation, but that would be foolish and a waste of time.

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.

Oh no I’m serious replying to a meme

Obviously this happens a lot but people get big mad at unions because they think this is happening and it isn’t necessarily.

The job may be posted internally and externally at the same time. All internal candidates who apply must be assessed first and replied to in order of what union they belong to depending on the job. If can take a long time because people kind of just apply to everything the same way you do as an external candidate.

Once they are all excluded then HR releases the external applicants for review. At no point are they compared with each other. Not all qualified candidates are contacted because there are probably dozens of them, so maybe the top 5 or so will be invited for the evaluation.

It’s shitty that there are people who don’t have work, but I get grumpy when people yell NEPOTISM and other things. If we wanted to hire an internal candidate unethically we could and it wouldn’t get posted externally. If we knew there were wrong internal candidates and we were doing things by the book we would post internal only. No one wants to deal with HR to get things posted externally, I promise.

Oh! Thanks for the correction.