Sky blue waves: Inside Marion’s water plant
Staff writer
Built in 1964, Marion’s odd-looking water plant is still going strong.
Blocky, made of large bricks, and painted a stark light blue by a former operator in the early ’80s, it strongly resembles a giant ice cube.
Compared to the industrial and fierce-looking Hillsboro plant, Marion’s is quainter, easier to digest.
Its pastel color, contrasting the dark woods beyond, wouldn’t feel out of place in a Wes Anderson film.
Three men work full-time at the plant: Duwayne Garrett, Jeff Mayfield, and Jason Wheeler. (Scott Heidebrecht is a part-time handyman.)
Wheeler, the only certified water operator, manages the plant.
“We just had the roof redone,” he said. “The windows and doors and a paint job are the next step for the exterior.”
The ice-cube color might disappear in the near future. Wheeler said he wants to paint the building “a darker blue.”
Two square sections on the plant’s second floor have been cut out of the wall.
Perhaps they once were openings to stairs or balconies. Doors still are attached to one of them.
The openings are used to move tanks of chemicals from one floor to another.
“We can bring it in either on a forklift or a high loader,” Wheeler said.
Eventually, he said, the plan is to convert it to office space.
Wheeler was slightly self-conscious about the state of the facility, though it wasn’t messy, more retro.
“We’re not quite where I really wanted to be to honestly give this tour,” he said. “We have some things in motion that are really going to bring us along.”
A husky man with an amicable drawl, Wheeler started at the plant in 2012, having previously worked in oil fields.
After nine years in the ice cube, he transferred to Hillsboro’s plant.
“Things had, just for me, gotten stagnant here,” he said.
But since 2023, Wheeler has been back in Marion.
“I visited with my father and my wife,” he said, “and just kind of thought, ‘I started here, I’d really like to finish here.’”
Marion’s water comes from Marion Reservoir — specifically, through a 12-inch-wide, four-mile-long pipe installed in 1981. (Previously, the city’s water came from Luta Creek.)
Only gravity is used to send water from the reservoir to the treatment plant.
The flow into the plant is dependent on the reservoir’s volume and is metered by little brown valves dotted around the complex.
“In drought summers, our flow can be drastically reduced,” Wheeler said.
The speed at which water travels to Marion isn’t fast by industrial standards, but more time spent in the pipes can actually improve quality, Wheeler said.
“It’s almost a pre-filter before it even gets to the treatment plant,” he said. “It has time to settle out in that pipe.”
The water first travels to an ozone basin, a concrete monolith next to the ice cube, for “pre-treatment.” Diffusers shoot the water with ozone gas, removing taste and odor impurities.
Next, the water enters a mixer inside the plant’s chemical room, which is laboratory-white and smells of chlorine.
“Right in here is where the magic happens,” Wheeler said.
A coagulant and a pale slurry of lime is added to adjust the water’s pH balance.
Ammonia also typically is added at this point, but is skipped over this time, as the plant is in an August “chlorine burnout.”
Free chlorine, a stronger and faster-acting disinfectant, will be used this month instead of typical chlorine-ammonia compounds. The free chlorine catches and removes lingering bacteria in the plant’s pipes.
Another optional addition is activated carbon, used to improve taste and smell when the lake is experiencing an algae bloom. (Ozone treatment takes care of the actual safety concerns presented by the algae.)
As fans whirs in the chemical room and generators buzz outside, Wheeler picks up some carbon on his finger, like a baseball player applying eye-black.
“It’s a real fine grain,” he said. “It almost looks like graphite.”
The water moves outdoors to a chain of clarifiers.
A steady flow is visible as it exists the building.
The entire clarification process used to be open-air, Wheeler said, but aluminum lids were attached in the early 2000s to protect against algae-stimulating sunlight.
He walked on top of the clarifier lids as he spoke.
“The heavier particles will kind of fall down into these mud valves,” he said. “It’s almost like a bonding material. The polymer is grabbing all the dirt particles and chunks out of the water, so it’s slowly settling.”
Like the intake pipe, the plant’s clarifiers are powered by gravity. Each rests on a 1/16-inch slant, slowly skimming sediment-free water off the top of the tanks.
All told, it takes water six hours to squirrel through the dozen or so clarifiers.
At the end of each day, workers open the mud valves below the clarifiers and feed the sludge into two outdoor wastewater lagoons.
The clarified water then travels underground to another basin, where it receives more ozone gas. Then it is sent to three indoor filters, two made of anthracite and one of activated carbon.
The filter beds are pale green and weathered, like a miniature hotel pool.
An opaque tarp separates the filter beds from a control room, which serves as working space for plant workers.
Inside the room, Garrett, Mayfield, and Wheeler monitor chemical levels in the water.
“We run based on consumer consumption,” Wheeler said. “This time of year, we’ve had a couple 14-hour days, but for the most part, we’re generally running for 10 to 12 hours.”
A door camera is pointed at a computer screen, allowing the team to check levels remotely. It’s a makeshift system, one Wheeler wants to replace, but it works.
“At any given time, I can pull up on my phone and see what our levels are and then let the guys know,” he said. “We look at it throughout the night and text each other.”
Surface water is more changeable than groundwater, and county water plants must frequently tweak the ratios and amounts of chemicals being used.
“It makes our job a little harder,” Wheeler said. “But I’m very confident in the water.”
He claimed to never buy bottled water.
“I want to drink what I’m making,” he said.
Two old but vital devices lie on the left side of the control room.
A large black device, which looks like a grid of safes but is actually the “master control” for the whole plant, rests against the wall.
A dusty panel with metal switches and buttons is used to control the anthracite and carbon filters.
“I don’t know if you’ve ever been over to the Cosmosphere,” Wheeler said, “but they’ve got some old NASA stuff that looks like this.”
Workers hope to install a new panel soon that will be a quarter of the size, Wheeler said.
The right side of the room already has been updated; three large computer monitors display indecipherable graphs and measurements.
Decor is sparse, in contrast to Hillsboro’s maximalist control room.
A Kansas City Royals schedule is stuck to a metal refrigerator, and a Donald Trump bobblehead, allegedly fished out of the city’s trash truck, sits on a desk, grinning.
Past an outdoor shop containing the plant’s ozone generators — “you get pretty warm in here,” Wheeler said — water flows to the basement, where it will receive a final chlorine and ammonia treatment before the process is completed and the water sent to an underground “clear well.”
The minty-green basement has four large pipes passing through it: green, yellow, red, and brown. Green feeds into the upstairs filters, yellow carries wastewater to the lagoons, and red is used for backwashing pipes and filters. Brown, somewhat ironically, is reserved for clear water.
Three service pumps in a light-blue shed outside feed Marion’s distribution system.
The pumps are being repainted; one recently transitioned from light to dark blue. A cigarette butt and open paint can lie next to it.
Two chemicals are stored in the shed: a salt-based polymer that helps protect the inside of the city’s water pipes, and a caustic soda used to adjust the water’s pH balance.
It can be frustrating, Wheeler said, to have city water undergo the entire treatment process and then be tainted by old pipes.
“We did one side of town with new pipes, and I’m hoping that we can continue to take advantage of some of this funding and do more,” he said.
Surrounding the water plant is a building for the electric department, a storage shop, and a dilapidated red-brick townhouse that used to be used for water softening.
“It’s old, dark, and scary,” Wheeler said.
Piles of silt and sand at the opposite side of the lot blow around in the wind.
One of the ozone generators is not working, and new monitors in the control room would be nice, Wheeler said.
“I would love to have a fourth full-time person,” he added. “I don’t know if that will ever happen.”
But the old ice cube is still going strong at 61 years of age and shows few signs of slowing down.
Wheeler said he was pleased with the direction the plant was headed.
“The situation that I’m in now is so much different than from the past,” he said. “I feel like the community as a whole is really wanting to work together to move things forward from an infrastructure standpoint. The water plant for years was just kind of put on the back burner.”