Welcome to the City of St. Helens Water Filtration Facility
The source of the City of St. Helens drinking water comes from a deep aquifer of water saturated rock, sand and gravel, 80 feet under the west bank of the Columbia river. The water flows, by gravity, from the aquifer into 16 foot diameter, sunken caisson wells by means of an infiltration gallery. The infiltration gallery consists of several screened, steel pipes that have been drilled out, radially from the bottom of the caisson out into the aquifer. This type of collection well system is called a Ranney collector. Since the water comes from the aquifer under the Columbia River, the source water is not affected by muddy river conditions resulting from heavy rain or snow melt, or even the pollutants that may be in the river. The water appears crystal clear year round, no matter how murky the river may appear.
The water is pumped from the Ranney collector well to the City of St. Helens, state of the art, hollow micro-fiber, water filtration plant. The filtration plant is designed to produce 6 million gallons of drinking water per day. There are 5 “racks” of microfiltration modules. 4 of the racks have 52 hollow fiber modules. Each module has a flow rate of 27 gallons per minute, and an entire rack of 52 modules can produce up to 2 million gallons of clean, fresh, filtered drinking water per day! The fifth rack, consisting of 19 hollow fiber modules, recycles the water used to flush the primary filtration racks during the filtration process. This feature of water conservation captures 98.9% of the water flowing through the facility. Another water conservation practice in the filtration plant captures and recycles an additional 12,000 gallons of water per week or 600,000 gallons of water per year! St. Helens is proud to provide a continuous, fresh, reliable, high quality, filtered drinking water to your tap, ready to serve you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
