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POINTE À LA HACHE, La. — It’s a complicated machine with a simple mission, to keep fresh water flowing to residents on the front line of Louisiana’s saltwater emergency. Integration Equipment
Thursday, large reverse osmosis filters arrived at the Pointe a la Hache water plant on the east bank of Plaquemines Parish.
The system can remove salt from saltwater, now moving up the Mississippi from the gulf.
“They promised me as the councilman for the east bank, they said Rev, we’re going to take care of the east bank and they have taken care of the east bank to bring this type of equipment here,” Plaquemines Parish Councilman Tyrone Edwards said.
The filters are capable of purifying about 400 gallons of water a minute.
“Around 500,000 gallons a day,” said Rodney Barrett from Onsite Water Management, the company that supplied the equipment. “It operates around 10 hours a day and for nighttime, the water is stored in this tower here.”
Barrett explained how the system works.
“The water comes out of the river, goes through their treatment plant like it normally would, then cycles back through our system and then back into their clear wells and is treated and redistributed,” Barrett said.
Sending clean, potable water to people’s homes.
Edwards was at the plant to get a look at the filtration system.
He says it erases a lot of the fear his constituents have about the potential impacts of saltwater intrusion.
“People are very fearful. We have a lot of elderly citizens, and they can’t even cook with the water. They use water for cooking. They can’t have sodium in the water.
Plaquemines Parish hopes to have a reverse osmosis system at each of its five water treatment plants.
However the filtration systems are hard to find.
“These systems are very hard to come by, basically due to the size of them,” Barrett said. “Once you start getting into these high flow rates on these systems, there’s not many of them that are prebuilt throughout the country.”
It will take about three days to set up the reverse osmosis equipment. The hope is the filters can begin producing fresh water at the Point a la Hache treatment plant by early next week.
Plaquemines Parish is also counting on a system of barges drawing water from upriver to supply a portion of the water at its treatment plants.
The first barge from the Army Corps of Engineers could arrive at the Port Sulphur plant as early as Sunday.
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