Mt. Pleasant Mills Revisted: Expansion Made Easy

Contractor/developer Carl Schaffer desired to provide new homes for a rural community in North Central Pennsylvania where septicsystems were not acceptable due to poor soils. Fortunately, his property location was close enough to the Village of Mt. Pleasant Mills that a sewer line extension could be made to the Cromaglass Wastewater Treatment System the community had designed and constructed back in 1988. (See Cromaglass Digest Vol. 5 #2, Winter 1989.) The local Perry Township sewer authority agreed to the addition to their facilities if Mr. Schaffer would assume responsibility for having the engineering and state permitting accomplished plus paying costs for the treatment plant addition.

This latter requirement was not difficult due to basic design of a Cromaglass Modular Sequential Batch Reactor System, which enables easy addition and connection of tanks and controls for more capacity.

The sewer authority's 10-year experience with the initial Cromaglass installation proved the reliability, performance and relative ease of operation. This plus the approval of PA DEP based on this project's performance history, convinced all parties that expansion with additional Cromaglass modules was the obvious solution.

Timely response by Cromaglass manufacturing and the ease of installation of the treatment system modules, met the installation schedule set by the contractor.

John Bickhart, Engineer, designed the required system and submitted the application to PA DEP who promptly issued the permit for expansion. Included in the application were two Cromaglass CA-120 modules. Additional disinfection capacity was not required because the original system, built in 1988, had adequate capacity. Disinfection is required since treated effluent is discharged to a small stream, which flows through the property. Provisions to add one additional CA-120 module have also been provided, to be utilized when needed.

An important item for the speedy DEP review was the familiarity of the agency staff engineers with Cromaglass design performance history, and reliability. Several permitted installations of varying capacities had frequent monitoring by DEP over many previous years.