West Morgan East Lawrence Water Authority opens new facility for clean water

HILLSBORO, Ala. (WAFF) - The West Morgan East Lawrence Water and Sewer Authority held a grand opening for its new reverse osmosis water treatment facility. Five years ago customers were told there was an excessive amount of chemicals in their water, and this facility is the solution.

The notice resulted in a settlement between the water authority and chemical manufacturer 3M years later. The authority’s new reverse osmosis facility was up and running this past spring, and now it’s officially open. Plant manager Dennie Robinson says this took years of planning.

“It’s been a long time coming. This community is very well taken care of with this water process we have now,” said Robinson.

Robinson says this $30 million facility is state of the art and much different from other plants. Robinson says conventional plants have sand filters or mixed media...

“Ours, we have many steps. We have membrane filtration which cleans it up really well against your suspended solids. Then we go through the RO which get’s your dissolved solids which takes out anything that’s dissolved, like the PFAs, or anything else that’s in the water that could do harm,” said Robinson.

Along with a lot of time, this took a lot of hard work.

“The engineers worked diligently to figure out a way and what’s gonna be best to fix the problem that was here before,” said Robinson.

A problem that this new facility hopes to permanently solve.

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