Seneca Water Facility receives Envision Silver Award

Renovations two years ago to the Seneca Water Treatment Plant on Lake Keowee have garnered the city an award, explains Seneca Utilities Director Bob Faires. “It is definitely an honor; its not something that we take for granted. We’ve gotten a number of awards at our plant, which we are extremely grateful for, but this was more of a larger scale, it reaches a lot of people in the utility world. It is an infrastructure-type of an award. It comes from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure out of Washington, D.C. So, it is something that we had to work pretty hard for, we realized this award, and Brian Royal with Harper Corporation brought it to our attention when we were nearing the end of our project. After looking at the parameters, we realized we had hit on just about everything that they were looking for, so we said well let’s take a look at it and see if we would actually even qualify for it. So, we did and it was quit an arduous process of going through and providing evidence to all the things not just that the project went through but all the parameters of construction, operations, community, and it is very much a broad scope of criteria that is required. So, to actually be able to be awarded this, we found out that we were the only water plant in the United States to be awarded this at this time. I’m sure that there will be more to follow but for right now we are the first and only at this point to have a water plant that has this Envision Award. And to receive the Silver level is just a testament to really the hard from the entire team and Harper Corporation for putting this together. So, it is something that no individual can really accept on their own, but it something that everybody had a full part in from somebody who was there on a daily basis to people that just offered suggestions along the way; its definitely been a community effort. It’s very much an award that we are thankful for and we appreciate but it also gives evidence to the team that was involved in the project. So, we are very, very proud and thankful for the recognition.” The $10 million renovation project at the Seneca Water Treatment Plant involved changing the disinfection process from chlorine gas to the safer sodium hypo-chlorite. There were also upgrades and changes to the sludge handling system.