Billings Gazette
As of Friday, there were only a few backhoes and bulldozers parked at 4374 Hesper Rd. , but some signage outside the construction zone shows the scale of the project.
"Billings West End Water Treatment Plant ," it reads.
When complete, the treatment plant will be part of a new system to augment the city's water supply, providing a massive boost to water reserves in case of emergencies, cater to a growing population in Billings and form reservoirs for recreation on the West End .
"The last thing you want is a hospital without water or a refinery without water, or a boil order," said Billings Water Quality Superintendent Louis Engels . "All of these investments push toward having a resilient, reliable water supply."
The Treatment
Nearly 90% of the country relies on public water supplies for its drinking water, irrigation and industrial needs. Treatment of public water systems in the United States start at the source, typically drawn from a river, reservoir or underground aquifer. Treatment plants can vary in design and scale, but they're all essentially massive chemistry sets, taking in water, mixing it, filtering it and disinfecting it, then pumping it to nearby municipalities.
Incoming water carrying dirt and other solid matter gets mixed with salt, aluminum or other chemicals with a positive charge. The resulting chemical reaction causes dirt and grime with incoming water to bind together. Large mixers then spin those solid pieces into larger chunks, heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the water flow.
The water then passes through a filtration system designed to catch any remaining contaminants, such as bacteria, viruses and parasites. The final step in treating water is usually adding a chemical disinfectant such as chlorine. Those chemicals are intended to kill lingering contaminants, and eliminate germs that might grow in the pipelines leaving the treatment plant.
Public water systems in Montana — anything that provides water to 25 or more people for more than 60 days a year or with 15 or more service connections — fall under the oversight of the state Department of Environmental Quality . There are thousands of such systems across Montana , with dozens added every year. It's the job of the DEQ to ensure every site is compliant with safety and quality standards. The majority of all the drinking water in Montana is derived from water systems within the state lines.
'Pretty darn clean'
Most people living in Billings get their water from the Yellowstone River . As that water passes Mystic Park , it gets pulled into the Gerald D. Underwood Water Treatment Plant . There it goes through the familiar four-phase process. Water pools into a basin at an intake site, where it gets mixed with chemicals to make the sediment cling together and sink to the bottom of the basin.
"It's pretty darn clean once you get to the filter step," Engels said.
In filtering, the water passes through layers of anthracite, a type of coal, then sand. Finally, the water sits in one of two 5 million-gallon tanks for chlorine to kill of any remaining contaminants.
With the Billings water treatment plant going into its second century of operation, it's old but it's not out of date. Additions and renovations have been added to the site piecemeal since it began operations in 1915. In 2015, plant management added a UV light to its disinfection process.
"We have a big, reliable source in the Yellowstone River ," said Engels, who has been superintendent for Billings Water Quality for about eight years.
As far as the daily volume of water used by the city, Engels uses a football field-sized pool as an analogy. During the winter months, that pool is about 30 feet deep. In the summer, Billings can burn through a pool that's 120 feet deep in a day. The water treatment plant has the capacity for 60 million gallons of water use in a day. In the midst of a regional drought in June 2021 , the plant hit that capacity, prompting limits on lawn watering in the city.
The water comes into the plant 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, stopping only in the case of an emergency. Most recently, a historic flood in 2022 shot through the Yellowstone River watershed, bringing with it soupy water thick with silt that was carrying debris from upriver. When the flood hit Billings , it flooded out the basins used in the initial steps of treatment and prompted a shutdown of operations that lasted roughly 12 hours.
Billings does have water reserves stored within 19 tanks around town, but those reserves are only enough for one day without the plant online.
West End Water
Ambitions to add an additional treatment site to Billings' water system go back decades, with plans for a facility on the West End gaining traction in the '70s. After years of studies on the part of Billings Public Works and proposals from the City Council , crews broke ground on the site of the West End plan in February of this year. At around $68 million , paid for by water fees from Billings residents, the plant will be the biggest public works project ever for the city in terms of cost.
The city's population in 2024 trumps what it was in 1915, and roughly 120,000 people currently utilize the City of Billings Potable Water System. As the city grows, Engels said, it's going to need a larger capacity for clean water. Along with the daily use of water, it's also going to need a large reserve of water in the event of another flood, oil spill or ice jam. The planned reservoirs on the West End will provide those reserves. The West End Water System will be fed by the Billings Bench Water Association Canal , which flows from the Yellowstone River near Laurel and largely supports agriculture in the western part of Yellowstone County .
"That's going to mean weeks of storage," Engels said. "Versus right now, which is hours."
The city has contracted with Dick Anderson Construction to build the plant, which in the past decade has updated the water reclamation facility in Livingston and Havre's water treatment plant, according to the company's website. City officials are anticipating the West End plant to begin operations by the end of 2026.
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