WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – Wichita’s new Northwest Water Facility, in the works since 2018, is now complete.
The half-billion-dollar facility will eventually replace Wichita’s 80-year-old water treatment plant in the Riverside area, but it won’t be fully up and running for some time.
Although the facility looks ready to go, it won’t be fully operational until April, and the City of Wichita says it’s not planning on closing the old Riverside facility and fully relying on this plant until summer 2025.
In the meantime, it’s going to take a lot of water to get this place up and running.
A facility for six years and $500 million in the making.
“There’s a lot that has to happen with the water treatment plant to really get it up and operating,” said Ty McGown, design manager. “It’s not a you push a button and everything just goes.”
Work on the project will stretch months into the future.
The facility, now complete, has to be tested through April.
“You have to make sure it does everything it was supposed to do, so we have to put it through a series of what’s called performance tests … and put it through some paces just to make sure it does everything it says it will do,” McGown said.
When you’re testing a water treatment facility, it takes a lot of water.
“There’s about five days where we will be at 60 million gallons a day,” McGown said. “Most of the rest of the testing is anywhere between 11 million gallons a day to about 40, 45 million gallons a day.”
All that water is going straight into the into the floodway, known as the “big ditch,” during a drought that sparked water restrictions in Wichita.
“We’ve tried really hard to minimize as much water as we can,” McGown said.
The design manager for the project says they will be limiting days when they’re at higher flow rates.
The city says the testing will be happening continuously through the spring.
There aren’t numbers on the total amount of water that will be used during the testing process, because the city hasn’t given KSN the number of days they’ll be testing.
Even after testing is complete, the Riverside facility will still be up and running along with the northwest plant.
