Sludge Watch ==> Synagro - Sludge Fluidized Bed Technology- Woonsocket Rhode Island

[maureen.reilly at sympatico.ca]

Sludgewatch Admin:

This is about a Rhode Island USA wastewater incinerator that is being 
replaced with more modern technology.  It would be interesting to see the 
difference in emissions between the old and new facilities.  It would also 
be good to know what company is making the fluidized bed...since only a few 
companies are in this line of work.

It is an interesting read...and has some financial info that is informative 
around how much these facilities cost.


.................................................................

The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.



The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.



The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.



Sludgewatch Admin:

This is about a Rhode Island USA wastewater incinerator that is being 
replaced with more modern technology.  It would be interesting to see the 
difference in emissions between the old and new facilities.  It would also 
be good to know what company is making the fluidized bed...since only a few 
companies are in this line of work.

It is an interesting read...and has some financial info that is informative 
around how much these facilities cost.


.................................................................

The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.



The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.



The Call

http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=16771991&BRD=1712&PAG=461&dept_id=24361&rfi=6


06/11/2006

Plans could alleviate city's sludge stench
By: MICHAEL HOLTZMAN , Staff Writer

WOONSOCKET - The bulging, 40-foot amber vessel, lined and strewn with rusty 
markings, looks like a jayvee version of what astronauts at NASA might use 
for practice runs.
In reality, it's not going anywhere.

This $2.5 million, fluidized bed incinerator, with a 25-foot wide diameter, 
was built and welded together here in eight pieces. It will pulverize - at 
1,600 degrees Fahrenheit - up to 100 tons a day of caked sludge and
almost instantly turn it into reddish ash.

The 80-ton incinerator is the central nervous system for Synagro 
Technologies Inc. and its investment of $12-13 million to replace outdated 
World War II-era technology with more efficient and environmentally updated 
equipment to dispose of the area's wastewater.

"If you went to look inside, it would look like the middle of a volcano. 
That's what's happening inside a fluidized bed incinerator," Joseph M. 
Megale, Synagro senior engineer and project manager, said during a tour 
Friday of the regional wastewater plant at 15 Cumberland Hill Road, behind 
the city's main fire station.

Megale last month gave the City Council a summary update on the progress of 
Synagro's construction project that's expected to be completed in the first 
quarter of 2007.

The company, in conjunction with city officials and Veolia Water Solutions & 
Technology, which for seven years has run Woonsocket's individual wastewater 
system, has scheduled a "community meeting" Tuesday at 5 p.m. at Veolia's 
nearby administration building at 13 Cumberland Hill Road. Attendance is 
encouraged.

It's an opportunity for citizen input on a system troubled by extremely foul 
odors in the residential Oak Grove area near Hamlet Avenue since at least 
the late 1980s, when the now-defunct New England Treatment Corp. (NETCO) 
began collecting regional sludge. Synagro handles the wastewater from 35 to 
40 area communities and disposes the ash byproduct at the regional landfill 
in Johnston.

Officials maintain conditions - and complaints - have improved markedly 
after Synagro, based in Houston, took over in late 2003, and they will be 
better still with the new technology.

Megale, who also oversees project operations at the company's Connecticut 
incinerator plants in New Haven and Waterbury, discussed at length the 
self-contained loading, transfer and incineration systems being built.

He explained that the existing and adjacent multiple hearth incinerator, 
which burns sludge far less quickly, efficiently and environmentally safe, 
will be shut down when the fluidized bed goes on line. The old steel and 
reinforced fiberglass smoke stack, about 270 feet high, will be removed.

The new stack, about the same height, will be built atop the fluidized bed 
incinerator, be made of stainless steel and be less obtrusive, Megale said. 
The emissions from it - particularly the nitrogen oxide - will be roughly 30 
to 50 percent lower, he said.

The modernized incinerator, according to Michael A. Annarummo, city director 
of administration/public works, is the latest technology, developed in the 
late 1980s and used more widely since the 1990s. Only three wastewater 
disposal plants in New England, including Waterbury, use it, he said.

The incinerator is made of one-inch steel and includes two brick linings 
about 15 inches thick, Megale said.
Caked sludge - which is 25-30 percent solids compared with the 3-5 percent 
solids of liquid wastewater trucked into the plant - is transferred into the 
fluidized bed through a series of nozzles set about every eight feet around 
the bed's perimeter.

That area will be completely contained within a 10,000-square foot, 55-foot 
high corrugated steel building, and both caked and liquid sludge will be 
handled and processed before entering the fluidized bed.

The bed will retain a stable mass of 100,000 pounds of boiling hot sand, at 
1,450 degrees Fahrenheit, upon which the pulverized ash will fall. Before 
that ash is sent to Rhode Island's landfill and used as a covering material, 
it will be captured with vertical scrubbers to help purify it.

By using the fuel energy that's in the sludge, and retaining heat through 
exchangers, very little fuel will be required after the incineration process 
is begun, Megale said. Natural gas with an oil backup are the fuels they 
use.

The area where a small number of trucks with caked sludge dispose the 
contents into three 12-foot high hoppers will be enclosed with the rest of 
the incineration process.

The fluidized bed, which now looks like it might have come out of a junkyard 
to the naked eye, will be sandblasted and painted silver - although no one 
will see it because the steel building will contain it.

Near a 600,000-gallon brick holding tank where most of the approximately 40 
tankers a day deposit liquid sludge from area communities, a new "bio-solids 
off-loading building will be built around the area and operated under 
negative pressure, drawing a constant vacuum, to mitigate noxious odors 
during off-loading."

New system could improve odor problem by 50 percent

City officials have long identified off-loading trucks exposed to the 
outside as a key odor problem. The building where those trucks will pull 
into will be about 80 feet long, 40 feet wide and 20 feet high.

A de-watering process is done to concentrate the caked sludge, where it is 
piped underground to the fluidized bed incinerator nearby, Megale said. "It 
all ends up as cake before it goes into the incinerator," he said.

Both the de-watered sludge from the tankers and any other trucks from towns 
that transport caked sludge, deposit the material into the hoppers where 
pipes will connect to the new incinerator.

Both Megale and Annarummo were asked in separate interviews about how much 
odor improvements citizens can expect from
these changes. Their answers were similar.

"It's a wastewater treatment plant. It's hard to be totally odor free at a 
wastewater treatment plant," said Megale, who's been working for Synagro 
since 1998.

But he said a positive relationship Synagro has established with Veolia - 
compared with the NETCO days - has resulted in efforts to solve problems 
rather than pointing fingers over which area was causing problems.

"In the past 10 years, I think it's improved 50 percent. And I think it will 
improve that much again," Annarummo said of the new technology impacting the 
odors. "We've gone from 30 complaints a month to two to 10 complaints a 
month."

Synagro uses a community hotline that citizens are encouraged to call with 
concerns and complaints, 765-7623.

"I don't think we can ever say there will never ever be an odor," said 
Annarummo, who's been dealing with this problem for a decade. "We've seen a 
great improvement and it should improve that much more."

He said the problem this administration inherited included the poor location 
for a regional sludge plant. Set in a "low bowl" with the neighborhood at 
higher levels and the closest house about 35 feet away, that compares to 
similar ventures built on flat land and homes 300 yards to a quarter mile 
away, Annarummo said.

"It's not a desirable situation," he said. But he said undoing it would 
contain huge financial and logistical pitfalls.

Looking at the positive side at this juncture, the administration and 
Synagro public relations officials note improved quality of life and 
finances for the city that the modernization changes will bring.

Under a 20-year contract extension that goes into effect when the fluidized 
bed is operational, financial improvements will include:

-      "Royalty" payments for regionally treated sludge that had been 
$60,000 a year under the old contract is expected to be $250,000 to $500,000 
a year, with Annarummo predicting it will be closer to the higher end.

-      Synagro has provided two $500,000 payments for "host fees" linked to 
a new contract. The second payment was made in March, several months after 
building permits were issued and ground breaking began in December.

-      The first of 10 payments of $45,000 each was made recently for 
Synagro's purchase of a newly built equalization storage tank on River 
Street, not needed by the city after Seville Dye went bankrupt.

-      Synagro's acceptance of seven tons a day of Woonsocket sludge from 
the wastewater plant run by Veolia, will be increased to an 11-tons a day 
limit, a service the city receives at no charge for allowing the regional 
collection plant to operate.

Annarummo estimates the city saves about $1 million a year by having Veolia, 
an international giant in this field, handle the city's wastewater.

Without that situation, and without the benefits derived from Synagro, he 
said the average single-family wastewater bill of about $230 a year would 
cost $400 a year. The city has about 10,000 wastewater customers, 1,000 to 
2,000 from outside the city.

Synagro, established in 1986 and expanding rapidly for the past 10 years, 
operates in 38 states, has 962 employees and has annual revenues of $370 
million, Megale said.

It has been positioning itself as a national provider of bio-solids services 
to municipalities and wastewater privatization projects throughout North 
America, a company spokesperson reported.

Synagro reported one serious accident at its Woonsocket plant, in March 2004 
when two licensed electricians from this area, working for a city 
subcontractor, suffered burns while welding, according to a prior article in 
The Call.
One of the two men returned to work within three months and the other - whom 
reports said suffered second- and third-degree burns - returned to work 
within nine months, a Synagro spokesperson said.

"This was the only accident at the plant going back to 1988 until the 
present day," said the spokesperson, Dyana Koelsch of New Harbor Group, a 
public relations firm in Providence headed by David Preston.