Your Wastewater Treatment Plant is Going Down — and Taking Your Budget with it

Let us tell you something you already know: No matter how well you do your job as an operations manager, your wastewater treatment plant will experience unexpected downtime. One of the main reasons is the state of the U.S. wastewater infrastructure, which earned a D+ in the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Infrastructure Report Card for 2017. Infrastructure is deteriorating and capital for upgrades remains scarce. That leaves the country’s almost 15,000 wastewater treatment plants more and more susceptible to structural failure, blockages, and overflow. Add the potential for operator error, hardware or software failure and unmet capacity, and it’s not if, but when, your plant will go down, along with your budget.

For many wastewater treatment plants, the only option during downtime is to send the sewage flow directly into the nearest waterway. That happens up to 75,000 times every year in the United States, according to the EPA. If it’s a spill of any size, you need to report it to the DEQ, which could lead to monetary penalties. But that’s only one of the many costs of even 5 minutes of downtime.

Downtime also triggers costs for lost staff productivity, labor and materials for repair, and rebalancing the system for restart. Add to that the potential for increased oversight by the DEQ, customer dissatisfaction, and loss of reputation for the municipality.

Let’s take a closer look at the costs and impacts of downtime at your wastewater treatment plant so you can effectively address them.

To read more, download our FREE guide, The Costs of 5 Minutes of Downtime. Even if downtime lasts only 5 minutes, the costs and impacts can be substantial. To avoid them, you need to know what you're facing.

The downloadable guide will give you a better idea of the costs when your wastewater treatment plant is down for 5 minutes—so you can think about how to avoid even short periods of downtime. If you have questions, please contact a Sunbelt Rentals representative. We’re here to help.