January 16, 2007
Field Trippin’: Water Treatment Facility
My son Caleb has been blessed with more than his fair share of curiosity. Satisfying that curiosity is not always easy. He has a gazillion questions about a gazillion different things. I guess it was about a year ago that he started asking about where the water went when he flushed the toilet. Not wanting to come up with some goofy answer like “Buddy, it went to poo poo heaven”, I began telling him that the water went to the water treatment facility.
That satisfied him for a while.
Then to further incite his fascination with where the poo poo water goes, we recorded an episode of Dirty Jobs where the host visited a water treatment facility. For a while it was all he talked about.
Now we’ve really done it.
This morning we went on a family field trip to the local water treatment facility. Actually it was the Noonday Reclamation Facility. Reclamation…heh…now that’s a euphemism. I bet you didn’t even know you could take a tour of your local reclamation facility. Some people take tours of museums and art galleries, but we take a tours of water reclamation facilities. Yeah, we’re a bit kooky I guess. But it’s for the kid.
And you know what? We were the only ones scheduled for the tour that day. We got a guided tour from the plant superintendent, Manuel Matthews. He was so nice and took us all over the plant. He showed us where the sludge comes in, how they add bacteria that literally eats the sludge, and how it comes out clean, and the trucks that haul off the solid waste to the landfills. It was actually very interesting. And wouldn’t you know it…Caleb was spellbound. He asked lots of questions and never seemed bored for the entire hour.
I wonder where our next field trip should be? Maybe a bread bakery. Now that would smell good.
