Water Treatment Plant

The City of Portland’s present Water Treatment Plant went into service in October of 2002. The main water source is the West Fork of Drakes creek, with City Lake being the alternate source during dry months or drought conditions. The water treatment plant (WTP) is a conventional filtration facility that includes the processes of rapid chemical mixing, flocculation, coagulation, sedimentation, and filtration. The water treatment plant is designed to treat a maximum of 3.0 million gallons of water per day. Currently, there are seven WT4 certified operators on staff with over 100 years of combined water treatment experience. On average, the Portland Water Treatment plant produces 2.3 million gallons of potable water every day.

In 2012, a series of improvements allowed the water treatment plant to operate more efficiently and prepared the facility for future expansion upgrades. These improvements included:

• covering the sedimentation basins to eliminate algae growth in the basins,

• installing tube settlers in the sedimentation basins,

• upgrading our SCADA system,

• and a dedicated line equipped with automated controls to re-charge City Lake was installed at this time as well.

WTP staff are required to collect, process, and report the results of several samples throughout the year, based mostly on the number of customers and/or previous test results for a particular analyte. The operators at the Portland WTP collect 25 samples from dedicated sampling sites throughout our distribution system every month for bacterial analysis. Staff process and analyze the samples, along with bacteriological samples from Castalian Springs-Bethpage Utility District and Westmoreland Water System, in the on-site bacteriological lab.

During a normal day, over 100 water quality tests are performed by the water plant operators to ensure the quality of the water delivered to our customers meets or exceeds the parameters set forth by the EPA and TDEC.

Today, there are 8,287 current connections in the system, which equals 21,795 individual customers, based on the household factor of 2.63.

Every year since 2005 the Tennessee Association of Utility Districts (www.taud.org) hosts the Best Tasting Water in Tennessee competition, and five times (2005,2010, 2012,2019,2022) the Portland Water System has won the competition for region 5, which includes Sumner, Robertson, Davidson, and Wilson Counties. We strive to bring a safe quality product to our customers and hope to win more these awards in the future.