Additional reporting by Suzanna Cook
(UPDATED: 1:33 p.m. Tuesday, October 8, 2024)
When most people turn on their taps, they’re often not thinking much about the hidden systems and people that ensure their access to safe drinking water in sufficient amounts.
Like most public infrastructure, as long as things are operating normally, it’s very easy to take them for granted.
“If I’m doing my job right, no one’s calling me,” said Greg Rossi, Production Manager for the New Jersey American Water Delaware River Regional Water Treatment Plant.
Rossi’s remarks underscore how nearly all the customers he serves daily are generally disconnected from a service that they expect to operate fairly automatically.
However, that doesn’t mean that the 50 million gallons of clean water that flow through the four-county New Jersey American Water (NJAW) – Western Division daily get there without significant investment in the people, processes, and technology that deliver them.
These systems are designed for resilience against extreme weather, upstream contaminants, and human behavior, and most of the people who enjoy the benefit of clean water that they provide never get to see how they work.
With that in mind, NJ Pen toured the treatment plant that processes about half the water consumed by a quarter-million people in Burlington, Camden, Gloucester, and Salem Counties.
Here’s what we learned.
Groundwater versus treated surface water
Located in Delran, New Jersey, the NJAW Delaware River Regional Water Treatment Plant was built in 1996 at a cost of roughly $100 million. Of the 50 million gallons of clean water that flow through the NJAW Western Division every day, the plant provides about half; the other half is pumped up from groundwater aquifers.
Groundwater is the most efficient source of water for the utility to provide because it requires less treatment before outflow to consumers; however, concerns about overtaxing the aquifer supply led to a demand for alternatives.
By supplementing the volume of water extracted from aquifers with treated surface water, the Delran plant is intended to ensure sustainable access to safe water for approximately 260,000 people.
On an average day, the plant pumps 20 to 30 million gallons of treated water via a 53-inch pipeline that Eric Hahn, NJAW Senior Director of Operations, described as “big enough to drive a car through.”
At its maximum capacity, the plant can pump up to 40 million gallons of water per day. Peak consumption hits in the summer, with demand driven by lawn care and swimming pools.
The system comprises one big and several small sources. Delran is its hub, supplementing a network of 70-plus wells drilled 100 to 700 feet into underground aquifers, including the Potomac-Raritan-Magothy (PRM), the Wenonah-Mount Laurel, and the Kirkwood Cohansey, the biggest in the state.
Locally, NJAW – Western Division also sources water from the Englishtown aquifer system as well as from the Maple Shade water department.
Its extended infrastructure includes a distributed network of unmanned storage and transmission facilities, like water towers in Oaklyn, Haddon Heights, and Cherry Hill, and booster stations in Barrington and Haddon Township.
Safety and infrastructure
Extensive precautions are taken to ensure that the quality of the water that reaches customers conforms to federally established guidelines no matter where in the distribution chain it’s drawn.
“Every day, each one of these facilities gets visited by a licensed operator,” Hahn said.
“Water is sampled, recorded, and compared against DEP regulations,” he said. “[The operator] sees water quality [as it’s] going out the door with an online analyzer. If [they notice] a station kick on or off, up or down, they check it.”
There is always a licensed DEP operator present in the plant, and specialists throughout the region conduct monthly water-quality tests in the 38 communities served by NJAW to ensure that contaminants aren’t entering the water supply after leaving the Delran plant.
Several systems in the plant are built with high-level redundancies. In the event of a power failure, for example, Delran has fuel on-hand to operate for four days via a series of diesel generators.
Operators prefer to head off any issues in the distribution system by adhering to a preventive maintenance schedule “to fix things before they become catastrophic,” Hahn said.
NJAW tracks the age of its installed system in the communities where it operates, and consults with local, state, and county governments to identify opportunities to coordinate those repairs with other roadway projects. The technicalities of government processes for planning, budgeting, and borrowing means that most projects are on five-year timetables at the soonest, Hahn said.
“We have good relationships with the towns we serve,” Hahn said. “The challenge is that many small municipalities have systems that need a significant level of investment. There’s a need to keep recapitalizing underground infrastructure. You can’t kick the can down the road.”
Industry-wide, water suppliers are dealing with a shortage of treatment plant operators, as long-time professionals age into retirement. There’s a particular focus on finding ways to advertise the variety of careers in water treatment to young people who are thinking about their vocational paths.
“You can get an entry-level position without a college degree,” NJAW Senior Director of Communications & External Affairs Denise Venuti Free said. “There are many avenues for training, tuition reimbursement, professional development.”
Some challenges that utility providers face have nothing whatsoever to do with their physical infrastructure. Cybersecurity incidents represent a growing concern according to a report from Reuters, which clocked virtual attacks on utility providers up 70 percent year-over-year in 2024.
Days after facilitating the NJ PEN tour of the Delran plant, American Water, the parent company of New Jersey American Water, reported that it had been the victim of a cybersecurity attack. The company responded by temporarily taking its customer billing portal offline offline, bringing in third-party investigators, and reporting the incident to law enforcement.
American Water said that none of its water or wastewater treatment operations is believed to have been affected. It did not offer any assessment of the impact of the intrusion on customer data.
Environmental concerns
As reliant as NJAW is upon well-maintained infrastructure and safety processes, the quality of the water that reaches its customers is subject to the same environmental factors that can affect the Delaware River at any point before it reaches Delran.
Upstream contamination is a constant consideration.
The Delaware originates in New York, its west branch in Mount Jefferson, and its east branch in Grand Gorge; the two converge in Hancock. Monitors in the Delaware River Basin Commission coordinate operations in both states to certify that the river continues to carry necessary volumes of water southward into New Jersey and beyond.
“The biggest thing we look for are long, extended droughts [that] bring the salt line up,” Rossi said.
The salt front is a seven-day moving average measuring degree to which seawater intrudes on the Delaware estuary; the downstream flow of the river helps push it back. The Delran plant is not equipped to process ocean water.
Extreme weather events brought on by climate change also pose ongoing challenges to the water treatment process. Strong storms can disperse a lot of particulate matter into the water, which then washes downriver. Rapid temperature changes also influence the water chemistry.
On stormy days, operators monitor the supply “more than daily,” Rossi said.
“When a storm comes in, the water quality can change really fast,” he said.
“We have the ability to adjust the water chemistry to optimize it.”
Another of the biggest environmental challenges for the future of water treatment is the presence in source water of per and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS.
Also called “forever chemicals,” PFAS are present in myriad manufacturing processes.
They’re also associated with a number of health problems. In April, the federal government finalized its enforceable standards for identifying and eliminating six kinds of PFAS in drinking water.
Starting in 2027, water utilities are going to have to notify the public about the PFAS levels in their drinking water. By 2029, they’re obligated to disclose whether those chemical concentrations exceed maximum contaminant levels, and take corrective measures if so.
“We welcome stricter regulations,” Hahn said. “The product should be held to a high standard.”
At the Delran plant, which also houses NJAW state and national research laboratories, researchers are studying a range of experimental water purification treatment strategies at any given time, including piloting different PFAS treatments.
Yet even as tightly regulated as the Delran plant is, its operators can’t know everything that’s in the water supply if they’re not testing for it.
In 2021, NJAW discovered that the plant was unwittingly passing along 1,4-dioxane, a chemical solvent, through its treated water because an upstream source in Allentown, Pennsylvania was processing it from an outside hauler.
Exposure to the chemical can affect lung, kidney, and liver function; it is believed to be associated with cancer risk, and can be fatal in significant amounts.
Although NJAW committed $2.5 million in upgrades to create a treatment process for the removal of 1, 4-dioxane from the water supply, the series of regulatory loopholes that allowed the chemical to reach the water supply offers a cautionary tale of the need for greater environmental oversight, as outlined in depth by Politico in 2022.
“Someone was trucking in chemicals in the Lehigh,” Rossi said, but “lots of times it’s hard to figure out” where contaminants originate.
The incident served to reinforce that “we’re very dependent on the people upstream of this treatment plant to behave,” Hahn said.
Treatment Process
In addition to constant monitoring and testing, the main way the Delran plant delivers drinking water within a range of tolerances that are healthy for the human body is through constant chemical adjustments.
The first step in treating the river water is ozone, which acts as a powerful disinfectant, killing 99.9% of pathogens and oxidizing metals in the water.
“Like an air diffuser in a fish tank,” ozone destroys most contaminants in the water, including volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and pharmaceuticals, with oxidation, Rossi said. The Delran plant has two ozone contactors, one of which largely serves as a redundancy.
Next, the plant adds ferric chloride to the water, a coagulant that attracts other small particles, clumping them together for easier removal. After that treatment, the water flows into a clarification basin, where superpulsators move it along through a series of plates.
Sedimentation floats to the top, and clean water goes through to a series of gravel and granular activated carbon filters in what Hahn described as “a polishing step,” removing “whatever’s left” from the water.
Clarification removes “90 to 95 percent” of contaminants via a low-maintenance process with few moving parts; gravity does most of the work, Rossi said.
The resulting “sludge” is de-watered and hauled away for fertilizer at a rate of about 50 tons per month.
(That process has its own potential concerns, namely the risks of passing along PFAS in the sludge, and thereby into the food chain, as the New York Times reported in August.)
Phosphate is added towards the end of the treatment process as a corrosive inhibitor, coating water mains to keep lead in the pipes from leaching out into the supply. Chlorine is a final added disinfectant that helps the water stay clean on its way to faucets across the region.
All chemicals used in water treatment are certified by the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF).
Takeaways for Consumers
The better the quality of the water source, the less treatment it requires to be drinkable, and the less strain on the system that processes it.
National legislation like the Clean Water Act has helped to protect sources of drinking water, but environmental stewardship is a shared responsibility. Even with legislative mandates and enforcement protocols, individual behaviors — like regulating water consumption and what kind of waste is allowed to enter the system — add up.
“Remembering the environment is so important,” Free said. “Source water is all we have.”
Moreover, the treatment plant operators want customers to know that their hearts are in their work as much as their heads.
“We care about the water going out the door,” Hahn said. “We know people are relying on it. It’s a precious resource. We don’t take that responsibility lightly.”
