Situated in Santa Barbara County, about 8 miles west of Vandenberg Air Force Base, the City of Lompoc is committed to providing its customers, which include Vandenberg Village Community Services District and Vandenberg Air Force Base, as well as the City, with safe, efficient, and reliable transportation and treatment of the community's wastewater. As a result, the city is currently rolling out its $80 million Lompoc Regional Wastewater Reclamation Plant Upgrade Project.

Aerial view of preconstruction site

Sludge-drying bed

This 27-month construction project is the product of 6 years of planning and design work. In 2002, the city prepared a wastewater master plan as a roadmap to implement system improvements and accommodate future growth and development.

The existing wastewater treatment plant has undergone no renovation since it opened in 1974. The plant has a daily capacity to treat 5 million gallons of wastewater through screening, primary clarification, infiltration, aeration, secondary clarification, and disinfection.

This upgrade will improve treatment reliability, add structural and mechanical improvements to existing buildings and facilities, bring in redundancy for some existing facilities, provide state-of-the-art instrumentation and control systems, allow the plant to meet new, stricter discharge requirements, and address various operational concerns and deficiencies.

The city hired Parsons as its construction contractor in January 2007 and broke ground on the project 3 months later. The work to be performed by Parsons includes:

• Excavation for new oxidation ditches, rock stabilization, and first concrete pour

  Internal walls of oxidation ditches

  Backfilling around tanks

  New headworks facilities downstream of the existing screens, including influent pumping, flow metering, Vactor truck-unloading station, grit removal tank, grit separation and dewatering facilities, and peak wet-weather flow equalization.
• New secondary treatment facilities, including oxidation ditch process, blower building, secondary clarifiers, and return-activated solids/waste-activated sludge (RAS/WAS) pumping.
• Metals removal facilities consisting of secondary effluent flow equalization using the existing aeration tanks, a new chemical storage and feed system, and new tertiary flocculators/clarifiers.
• New tertiary cloth-media filters and waste backwash water handling.
• New ultraviolet (UV) disinfection facility with effluent pumping and disposal using existing facilities.
• New filter/UV disinfection building, including a motor control center (MCC) room.
• Solids-handling facilities (with new, dissolved air flotation tanks to thicken waste-mixed sludge) and upgrading the sludge lagoons, biosolids drying beds, and dried biosolids storage facilities.
• New boilers to heat the digesters.
• New biofilter to treat foul orders.
• New electrical power distribution and instrumentation/control facilities, including new electrical building, outdoor MCC, and electrical trenches.
• Completely new, plantwide supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system.
• Modifications to existing electrical, instrumentation, and process facilities.
• Stone columns for foundation stabilization.
• Landscaping.
• Modifications to former chlorine building.
• Grading, paving, piping, and miscellaneous improvements throughout the wastewater reclamation plant.

Parsons will self-perform concrete, mechanical, earthwork, utilities, and other work elements in the construction of this project. After the project is completed, the new fiber-optics SCADA system will manage this upgraded Lompoc Regional Wastewater Reclamation Plant. The new system will monitor the plant's flow rates, gather information about its operations, and turn the pumps on and off. The plant is slated for completion in September 2009.

Back