WQ0005790_LV-2022-0168_20220628

From: Fish Factory Rd
To: Perez. Helen I
Cc: Kenny Von Voigt; Mark Moore; David Kellv
Subject: [External] notice of violation and civil penalty
Date: Tuesday, June 28, 2022 10:28:24 AM
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Good morning Helen we just received our civil penalty for our march 2022 violations of fecal, BOD
and ammonia. In the recent summer months we have continually experienced atypical problems for
our plant in a time of year that has historically proved to be a remarkably easy time to successfully
treat wastewater. The summer months tend to provide us with seemingly ideal flow rates and food
to mass ratios. The best we can tell we are still getting acceptable flows (ideal MCRTs) and better
than off-season F/M ratios. The only clear changes that we have noticed are that
1) we have virtually no floating grease in our system that is normally a daily operational duty to
dispose of
2) we haven't had to add nearly as much Lime to stabilize our PH (often three days to a week
without any Lime as our PH stays higher than years past commonly >7.4)
3) our plant will go upset virtually overnight without major operational adjustments
4) we can notice an abundance and variety of life under the microscope one day only to see
remnants and sparse populations the next day
5)after our weekly algae scrub of our clarifiers the smell and cleaning effects of chlorine will be gone
in under an hour when in years past we would be overwhelmed by the smell even the next day
While we will continue to seek what it is on our end that we can do better, we feel that there is a
source of wastewater coming into our plant that we aren't designed to treat. Per our last discussion
we talked about a "nitrate block" situation and feel that this could be the result of said wastewater
killing nitrifiers and further disrupting our chlorine disinfection system. We don't want to solely make
excuses for our failing samples so we will continue to question our operating procedure in our most
successful time of year in the hopes that we could be overlooking something.
Sincerely,
Kenny and Kyle