Bill Goldsworthy, who runs Telluride’s wastewater-management facility, never has to look at the crowded streets or ski slopes to know when the town is flush with visitors. In his purview, it begins to look a lot like Christmas when there’s a huge spike in the amount of sewage arriving to be processed.
“We’ll see pretty average numbers for the first half of December, but come this weekend, our flows will go from 400,000 gallons or 500,000 gallons a day to over a million gallons a day from Christmas to New Year’s,” he predicted.
“Then, after New Year’s, it’ll drop down to 800,000 or 900,000 a day.”
The holidays are a time for the treatment plant’s residential micro-organisms to celebrate, too. About three weeks before Goldsworthy knows that the wastewater input will escalate, he builds up the local population of protozoans, rotifers and other microorganisms that feed on sewage.
The trick is keeping a good balance of those indiscriminate but fragile diners. Golds- worthy needs fewer of those bugs in October, when the influx is about 500,000 gallons a day, than he does now, when Telluride’s population triples.
“With no sewage coming in, you have sick bugs who die or go to the river,” he explained.
“We’re trying to keep the amount of bugs at the maximum we can handle because we know in a couple of weeks, we’ll get a bunch of sewage, and to treat that, we need bugs. Last June, the Friday before the week of the Bluegrass Festival was 700,000 gallons, and on the Friday of Bluegrass, the flow was 1,350,000.”
Claire Martin
