Village of Taos Ski Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant

The Village of Taos Ski Valley wastewater treatment plant provides treatment to the Village along with the ski corporation base area, hotels, and associated commercial buildings and housing. The plant has a maximum design flow of 0.44 mgd during peak ski season, yet only a fraction of the flows during the summer. The public works department faced unique challenges:

• Influent wastewater flow and loading during Spring Break and Christmas holiday periods exceeded the mountain community's existing wastewater treatment plant current capacity,
• The plant capacity needed expansion by an approximate factor of 2.5 times, and
• The plant site is limited by adjacent National Forest land.

These circumstances required a focused and site-specific solution.

Plummer was selected to provide planning, design, bid, and construction engineering services. Design included retrofitting the existing headworks to fit a new 2-millimeter mechanical screen and a nested Parshall flume, reuse of the existing influent equalization tank, and conversion of the existing treatment tanks to MBR tanks and anoxic tanks. New aeration and post-anoxic tanks were added. 

We proposed an innovative application of MBR process technology for the expansion and substantial retrofit of the mountain town's wastewater treatment plant to provide the community with a high performance, low cost, technically and publicly defensible pathway to attaining stringent total nitrogen and phosphorus effluent limits. This approach fully utilized existing treatment basin infrastructure and minimized additional treatment basin construction. 

To enable construction of the new facilities, the existing wastewater treatment plant had to be taken off-line for approximately six months. The contractor provided a short-term, contractor-owned rental MBR during this time that avoided any disruption to wastewater treatment during construction activities. Our team was able to initiate construction quickly and avoid delays that would impact the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays which is when the Village of Taos Ski Valley is at its busiest.