East Chicago Water Membrane Filtration Plant

To better serve the city’s 32,000 residents as well as industrial and commercial customers, a new 20-MGD pressure membrane water filtration plant was developed with a hydraulic capacity of 30 MGD to meet 30-year projected demand. Our firm’s engineering team designed the new a raw water pump station, chemical feed systems, and high-service pumping. Numerous low-impact and sustainable design elements were incorporated, including supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) and programmable logic controller (PLC) controls, rain gardens, drought-resistant plants, green building materials, low-flow plumbing fixtures, and high-efficiency lighting to truly make this new plant and tank state-of-the-art.

The existing lake water intake line was extended by microtunneling under multiple railroads, utilities, and a state highway to the new raw-water pump station. The membrane facility is in architecturally pleasing, insulated, precast concrete structural panels that houses the chemical feed systems, cleaning systems for the membranes, high-service pumps, and maintenance and operations centers. Other aspects of the water management project include a gravity plate settler for solids removal from the backwash water to maximize utilization of the water withdrawn from the lake, a new raw-water pump station, micro-tunnel under railroads and highways to connect the existing intake line to the new raw water pump station, and a 4-MGD clean water storage reservoir.