UWindsor prof hopes to cleanse great lakes
By Michal Tellos
News Editor
October 7, 2009
 Years of research may have finally paid off for a UWindsor professor and several of his former students.
Niharendu Biswas, professor and senior associate dean of engineering, initiated research years ago that would help clean up the Detroit River, and construction based on their model could start as early as this winter.
Biswas and his team have been studying storm water mixing with raw sewage during times of heavy rainfall. If the rainfall is too heavy, water treatment plants cannot handle the sudden influx of water, and it simply gets diverted to different areas.
Unfortunately, in Windsor-Essex county it gets diverted either back to the Great Lakes, or to the Detroit River, and storm water can be a major pollutant of both. There are impurities, often, in both the sewage and the storm water.
Based on a pilot-scale model, Biswas and select students, in cooperation with Stantec Consulting and the city of Windsor, have come up with the idea to build a large basin somewhere near the river.
Using the pilot-scale model involved taking readings during times of heavy rainfall, and Biswas explained that this was sometimes demanding.
“If it rained at midnight, you had to go for sampling. It was one of those projects where you were on call. You had to be there to collect the samples after a certain amount of time,” he said.
The pilot-scale model was built inside the Lou Romano reclamation plant.
“We used to pump waste water which would normally be diverted, and we would pump it into the treatment plan, treat it, and then take readings to see how clean the effluent was,” said Biswas of the research.
The basin, which would be underground, would be roughly the size of a football field, and it would sharply reduce the amount of effluent (waste) flowing into the Detroit River.
According to Biswas, the environmental impact of building such a basin is enormous.
“The [environmental] footprint will be approximately five, six, seven or even 10 times less than what it is now,” he said.
This problem of excess water has been exacerbated in recent decades due to rapid population growth, which facilitated a boom in construction.
“What happened is that most of the cities around the Great Lakes have expanded, and when you expand, you put in more roads, more parking spots, more houses. When the rain comes, these are what we call impervious,” said Biswas, explaining that when a structure is impervious, water becomes runoff instead of simply percolating into the ground, evenly distributed.
The entire project will cost approximately $60 million, a price that “includes some renovation of large pipes that carry storm water during heavy rain, and of course the treatment basin and the pumps, and so on.”
Greg St. Louis, a former student of Biswas is in charge of the project from the city’s perspective, and he argues that had it not been for the assistance of the university, the price could have very easily been double that.
After the water is treated, and once the storm is over, the sludge from the polluted water will be sent to the Lou Romano reclamation plant, where it too will be filtered.
Almost all of the funding for Biswas’ research has come from the Ministry of Environment as well as the city of Windsor, who Biswas cites as a great help to the project..
“We got the funding from the Ministry of Environment, and the city put in some funds as well,” said Biswas, who explained that the university will usually just provide an infrastructure in which to perform tests and research.
According to St. Louis, the location for the basin will most likely be underneath the parking garage of Riverside Dr. and Aylmer Ave.
To Biswas’ knowledge, the project will be one of the most efficient of its kind.
After water has been collected, it will be filtered and made to meet clean water requirements before being pumped back into the Detroit River.
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