Increasing Drinking Water Reliability

For more than 50 years, the Town of Breckenridge relied on its Tarn Water Treatment Plant. It has reliably provided high-quality water to residents but was in need of extensive refurbishment. The town knew they needed to begin planning for an alternative water source. 

The $45 million North Water Treatment Plant — the largest infrastructure project in Breckenridge history — provides a second source of drinking water, redundant treatment capacity and operational flexibility; protects the town’s water rights; and improves the Blue River environment when operating alone. As the town flourishes the plant also provides critical backup to their potable water supply. The on-budget, on-schedule, 4.5-million-gallons-per-day NWTP includes three pump stations, a surface water intake, conventional treatment process, miles of pipelines and mechanical dewatering to use every drop of Colorado’s precious resource, dried solids and online water quality analyzers from process drains, and dried solids as the only waste stream leaving the NWTP.

It’s Colorado’s largest loan approved through the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program, administered through the State of Colorado. 

The design team evaluated several treatment processes, but the robustness and familiarity of conventional settling and dual-media filtration proved best for the town. The NWTP project comprised all elements of water infrastructure engineering. At the Blue River, the project’s raw water source, the team designed and constructed a surface water intake and two pump stations. A low-pressure pump station sits adjacent to the intake, and a high-pressure raw water pump station with five 150-horsepower pumps conveys water in a 3.5-mile pipeline up to the NWTP site. At the NWTP water is treated through a conventional process including rapid mixing, flocculation, plate settlers, filter and contact basins for disinfection. Potable water is then pumped to the North Storage Tank by four 250-horsepower vertical turbine pumps through a 2-mile finished water pipeline. Waste streams are collected and treated through a residuals process and almost all of the water is recycled through the process in an effort to conserve water.