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Photo by Hans Hallgren

Mike Frazier, wastewater plant manager, uses a small, curved pitchfork to clean the bar screen that leads into the plant's first treatment pond.

Photo by Hans Hallgren

A family of 11 ducks float in a pond on the sewage treatment plant site, filled with water that has gone through the full cycle. If the ducks start having problems, the city knows its has a problem at the plant.

A family of ducks swims, drinks and plays.

Green, blue and gray feathers shimmer with the dewed water from the pond they live in, built right next to a solid separator at the Craig wastewater treatment plant.

They swim around pipes that spray treated sewage water into the air, without a single care of where they are.

Mike Frazier, wastewater plant manager, keeps a keen watch on them, wary of something going wrong.

Something like dead ducks.

"It's exactly like a canary in a coal mine," he said, explaining the ducks' presence at the pond.

Sewage treatment plants are some of the most important modern facilities in America, Frazier said.

Nearly every city in the country gets its water from a source that is downstream of another city's sewage treatment plant.

"It's pretty important for those plants to do their job right, then, isn't it?" Frazier said. "Take Craig for instance. We drink from the same Yampa River that Steamboat does. All those people are peeing and pooping, and we're drinking Steamboat's sewage water."

Which Frazier added doesn't bother him in the slightest.

"This sewage water is probably cleaner than what they make bottled water out of," he said. "Take Cleveland. Well, Cleveland is downstream of Akron, which means that any bottling plant in Cleveland is packaging Akron's sewage water.

"I'd rather drink our water than anything coming from Akron."

With that in mind, city officials have not been ignoring the wastewater plant, though it hasn't gotten the same attention as the water plant, which just went through an $8 million construction project.

City officials are in the process of doing minor maintenance updates to the sewage facility, such as a roughly $28,000 roof replacement project, but the plant remains much the same as it was when built in the late 1980s.

The biggest change to the plant has been a computer overhaul installed a few years ago, which automated most of the treatment systems, Craig City Engineer Bill Earley said.

In the next four to eight years, officials plan to build a third "sludge lagoon" - a large pit filled with sewage after it is separated from water going to the Yampa River - to keep up with growth.

Earley said that could cost between $500,000 and $700,000 today, but probably will be more when the city opts to build it.

That's not to say the water plant is more important than the sewage plant, but rather the sewage plant just hasn't needed much work.

The wastewater plant only runs at half capacity now, putting out about 1.1 million gallons of sewage a day.

The difference between the plants is two-fold, Earley said.

"People like their yards, and they use a lot of water just watering their yards," he said. "The biggest reason, though, is the regulations haven't changed for sewer plants."

Tighter drinking water restrictions prevent the water plant from producing as much as it could. The sewage plant has not faced that burden recently.

"The wastewater plant is in pretty good shape," Earley said. "It just needs a lot of maintenance."

Collin Smith can be reached at 875-1794 or cesmith@craigdailypress.com.