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Charlotte Water’s McAlpine Creek Water Facility Rehabilitation
As part of the rehabilitation of the McAlpine Water Treatment Plant, Charlotte Water is putting new mechanisms in all the secondary clarifiers.
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harlotte Water in North Carolina is working on a major refurbishment program to improve its McAlpine Creek Wastewater Facility and address the aging of the infrastructure, some of which dates back to the 1960s. The project aims to rehab the heart of the plant, and will involve refurbishing or replacing aeration systems, blowers, and clarifiers and performing recoating of selected elements. In this interview, Charlotte Water’s deputy utilities director for operations, Ron Hargrove, tells Municipal Water Leader more about this major undertaking and about the utility as a whole. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background, your work experience, and how you got involved in water.
8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | February 2021
municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHARLOTTE WATER.
Ron Hargrove: I graduated from Clemson University in 1987 with a bachelor of science in microbiology and wound up getting a job at the environmental lab of an engineering firm in Greenwood, South Carolina. Through that, I was introduced to water. One of my first projects was taking samples along a river in Virginia for a proposed paper mill
expansion project. That is how I learned about effluents and their effects on water quality. I worked for a little while for a hazardous waste incinerator, where I treated the cooling water from the scrubber. There was a pretreatment system to reduce the amount of heavy metals that was discharged to the city’s collection system. In 1989, I got a job at Charlotte Mecklenburg Utility Department, now known as Charlotte Water, and I’ve been in a municipal career ever since. I started out as a senior chemist in the lab, overseeing the daily water treatment process control. I also performed distribution system monitoring to ensure that all regulations were met and responded to customer water quality complaints. The 1990 lead and copper rule was the biggest regulatory event of the period. I was the lead staff member identifying our tier 1 sites and performing monitoring. Charlotte had great compliance levels due to the corrosion control it employed, and it passed with flying colors. That showed me how regulations directly affect utility workers and the work of treatment plants. I left Charlotte after about 4 years and moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where I
