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The article focuses on the initiative taken by Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant in Baltimore, Maryland to improve the facility's headworks by eliminating hydraulic restrictions. It discusses the wastewater treatment capability of the plant, and states that the new influent pump station which is being installed, will help in decoupling the outfall sewers.

The article focuses on the use of intelligent sequencing batch reactor (iSBR) control in water treatment facilities, such as the Daniel Island Wastewater Treatment Plant in South Carolina. The optimization steps in the iSBR concept--which increased the treatment plant's processing capacity with the addition of aeration and ultraviolet disinfection units and an effluent equalization tank--are explained, as well as the term "nitrification shoulder." The potential benefits from iSBR control are energy savings, higher viability of the nitrifying biomass, less opportunity for filament growth, and lower nitrate concentrations.

As effluent requirements become more stringent and biological wastewater treatment processes become more complex, using a mathematical process model as part of plant operations becomes increasingly advantageous. In addition to saving time and money by predicting plant performance and effluent quality and providing a basis for testing alternative operational strategies, process models can also improve operator understanding of the treatment process. An innovative approach to process modeling was developed to meet the needs of wastewater treatment agencies.

The authors report that because effluent limits on municipal wastewater treatment plant discharges are causing treatment costs to rise, smaller communities may want to implement low-technology (low-tech) systems. According to the authors, low-tech systems can attain effluent concentrations that are close to high-tech systems. The authors compare three low-tech systems at wastewater treatment plants in South Carolina to four high-tech systems and present their findings related to performance, cost, and other benefits of the high and low-tech systems. A chart of the performance records of the plants is included.

The article reports on the slow fiber-optic communication network problem of Pleasant Grove Wastewater Treatment Plant in Roseville, California. Plant operators identified the workstation problem to be coming from the optical communications modules (OCM) that sustained the workstations. Another source of the problem was that the graphics software for the treatment procedure needed more bandwidth than what was originally designed. A research by engineer Dan Mazorra showed that a new redundant fiber network using gigabit Ethernet switches can support the workstations and surveillance cameras. However, some modifications to the Ethernet OCM network system were made because the multimode fiber identified by Mazorra showed an impediment in terms of available bandwidth at gigabit speeds.