Amador County – The Amador Water Agency earlier this month dedicated a new backwash filtration plant in Buckhorn that was purchased second-hand for an estimated savings of up to $380,000.

The used backwash system, installed at its Buckhorn Water Treatment Plant, was valued at about $450,000, and it will help the plant stop runoff from its storage ponds on Mace Meadow Golf Course by reducing the amount of water sent to the ponds. The AWA Board of Directors held a special meeting May 9 at the Buckhorn Plant in Pioneer to take visitors on a tour of the plant, to dedicate the new backwash recycling system, and to laud employees for their work on the project.

The system recycles backwash, which is “water used to clean treatment plant filters,” said Agency General Manager Gene Mancebo, and it “has dramatically reduced the amount of water sent to a storage pond at the Mace Meadow Golf Course and solved a perennial wastewater storage problem on the upcountry water system.”

The “used backwash water from the Buckhorn plant is piped from Buckhorn to Mace Meadow Golf Course where it is stored in a pond and then used for irrigation,” Mancebo said. “Reduced irrigation on the golf course during many past winters caused the Mace Meadow storage pond to fill to emergency levels” recently, and caused “a situation that risked regulatory fines and occasionally required water conservation by Upcountry water customers.”

On a typical winter day, Mancebo said the Buckhorn Plant uses about 40,000 gallons of water to backwash or clean out treatment plant filters. That backwash water must be handled as wastewater, according to state law. “Recycling the backwash water back through the treatment plant is now reducing the water sent to the storage pond by about 90 percent,” he said.

In January, AWA Operations Manager Chris McKeage purchased a second-hand filter system from an apple juice company for $5,000. Another $65,000 of AWA staff time and materials went into installation of the used filtration plant, which was up and running by late-February. McKeage estimated that a new plant of similar design would have cost as much as $450,000 before installation.

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