USFilter: High-quality water demand fuels mobile water treatment trend

SCHAUMBURG, IL, Sept. 1, 2004 -- Municipal drinking water facilities, power plants, refineries, chemical plants and various other industries all need an uninterrupted supply of high-quality water.

Sometimes factors such as a drought, contaminated water, a change in process water quality requirements or the shutdown of a water treatment system for maintenance, affect a plant's ability to meet its purified water needs. When that happens, the plant needs an alternate water supply -- fast.

Mobile water treatment offers a quick, cost-effective solution. A phone call to a mobile water treatment provider sets the wheels in motion, and a trailer containing water treatment equipment soon arrives at the customer's site. It's not only emergency situations that call for mobile water treatment, however. Mobile trailers provide purified water for pilot facilities, interim use until a permanent system is installed, system scale-up, zero discharge applications and scheduled maintenance of permanent systems.

With water shortages, more stringent environmental regulations and the cost of capital equipment on the rise, more businesses are choosing mobile water treatment for emergency, seasonal and short-term water treatment needs. This trend is no surprise to USFilter, a leading provider of water and wastewater treatment systems and services, of which mobile treatment plays a key part.

"We've seen a significant increase in the number of requests for emergency mobile treatment and temporary mobile treatment contracts over the past few years," says Pete Sesing, USFilter's vice president for mobile and onsite services. "We're in an excellent position to meet these demands with our extensive fleet of filtration, deionization, reverse osmosis and clarifier trailers that we dispatch from locations throughout the U.S. Over the past two years, we have significantly invested in our business to ensure the fastest response to our customers."

"We served a record number of mobile customers last year," reports Sesing. "Our mobile and outsourced services group produces over 86 million gallons per day of purified water for our customer base."

A recent treatment project involved the Cucamonga Valley Water District in Rancho Cucamonga, CA. USFilter provided emergency trailers for nitrate removal from a dormant well that needed to be brought back on line during a water shortage. In late May 2004, the water district learned that its normal supply of water would be interrupted in a week because of emergency supply line work. This shutdown would have caused a 60-percent reduction in the water supply to 43,000 connections. USFilter sent multiple mobile units to the well site in Rancho Cucamonga. Each unit processed 400 gallons per minute of influent well water, removing the nitrate with an NSF-certified resin. The mobile services allowed an uninterrupted supply of treated water for the district, with no waste discharge at the site. Besides bringing the well on line, the mobile treatment provided an additional 10 million gallons of water during the emergency water shortage.

In the industrial sector, USFilter has provided mobile water treatment to power plants requiring extra water capacity. In June 2004, USFilter supplied two emergency mobile trailers to PSEG Power's Mercer Generating Station in Trenton, NJ, preventing a plant shutdown.

USFilter was already providing reverse osmosis and demineralizer equipment to Mercer Station during plant start-up, as part of a build-own-operate agreement. A sudden increase in water demand, combined with the discovery of colloidal silica in the city water, meant that the plant needed mobile trailers with carbon pre-treatment, reverse osmosis and demineralization.

"We were literally minutes away from being shut down because of the demineralized water demand," says Mark Schwartzkopf, senior environmental engineer, Mercer Generating Station. "I called USFilter's Fallsington, PA, branch at noon on a Friday, and we were making water by 8 p.m. that night. The extra trucks provided the capacity to stay on line and ride out the problem. We would have lost days on the start-up if USFilter had not come through."

USFilter has been meeting customers' mobile water treatment needs for over 30 years, and offers a number of separation technologies, including deionization, reverse osmosis, clarification, and any combination of carbon filters, multimedia filters, softeners or dealkalizers in a single trailer. For more information about mobile and onsite services, visit www.usfilter.com/water/Business+Centers/Mobile_and_On-Site_Services/.

USFilter Corp., a Siemens company, delivers cost-effective, reliable water and wastewater treatment systems and services to municipal, industrial, commercial and institutional customers worldwide. It has annual revenues of $1.1 billion, and employs 6,000 worldwide. USFilter is part of Siemens' Industrial Solutions and Services Group (I&S), which provides innovative solutions and services designed to improve competitiveness in processing and manufacturing industries and in infrastructure. In fiscal 2003 (to Sept. 30) I&S employed a total of 25,000 people worldwide and achieved total sales of USD $4 billion (EUR 4.012 billion). Visit company websites at www.usfilter.com, and www.siemens.com.

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