Montana Army National Guard – Water Purification
Author: Matt Nelson
Montana Army National Guard – Water Purification
Matt Nelson
Members of the Montana Army National Guard, 3rd Platoon Company Alpha 372nd Division Sustainment Support Battalion (DSSB) have the primary purpose of water purification. This unit is based out of Libby. They came to Canyon Ferry Lake for a training exercise to purify the drinking water out of the lake. They were here on Saturday, August 10th and departed on Monday, August 12th. The Company Commander is Captain Daniel Warhank; the 1st Sergeant is Miles Baughman, and Sergeant First Class (SFC) Jacob Teske leads the men and women who perform the purification tasks. Sergeant Morgan Lawson has been working with the 3rd Platoon as a water purification specialist for 7 years. She said that most people don’t know about this position that the military has. Captain Warhank mentioned that younger people are needed.
SFC Teske explained the operations. “Out here at the Silos/ Canyon Ferry we are doing water purification. This is our first time here. This is Bureau of Reclamation land; we got approved through them to use this area for water purification.” He showed the purification equipment. It is a complex setup. “It is a complex system of simplicity. We have a lot of standards that we have to meet, as for the army and the medical side before we can even give anybody a drink of water. We can be up and running and making clean potable water within an hour from the start of the whole process. For our testing abilities, we have to send it off to Med Det (Medical Detachment). They come out, and they are the ones who check off whether or not we can give people drinking water. Depending on that you are looking at up to 24 hours. At that point we start filling up a bags with water but we can’t issue that until we get the clear. Once we get the thumbs up, ‘You guys are good!’ we can start giving out the water from there.”
To get good drink water several steps are required. SFC Teske explained: “We pull the water out which goes into a bag, like a settling bag, then it goes into a machine, and from there it goes into two different sets of filters. One is like a ground water type of filter, after that it gets sent through a high pressure through another set of reverse osmosis filters and it comes out as either waste side or product side. The waste contains everything in the lake, the debris that makes it through; we just want that to get back out. There is an antiscalant to keep everything off of our filters or actually getting in and destroying our filters. Then there is a hyper-chloride which is sodium-bisulfate bleach like chlorine that gets injected right at the end. We set it so that we either have storage water or drinking water. Those are the only two chemicals we use consistently.”
After this he showed a tanker truck called a ‘Hippo’, which they pump the purified water into. It has a storage tank which has a capacity of 2000 gallons, and two pipes extend from the end that the purified water and fill up jerry cans and canteens for local use, or they can send the truck out to other places that need drinking water. There are hose reels inside; once the pump motors are started, the tank will drain in about five minutes.
All of these people mentioned would like to come back to Canyon Ferry again. Several people showed up and were curious about what was going on. The military personnel were happy to talk to these people, and explain that they were out here for training which is important to them. It is also good for the state emergency side, for as an example, if something happened to the Townsend water supply this fine group of soldiers would be immediately called out. By having their training session at Canyon Ferry Lake, they now know the location where they could immediately pull water, make purified water, make drinking water and get it to the people.
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PhotoCredit: Photo Credits: Matt Nelson
Image 1 Caption: Staff Sergeant Matt Gates
Image 2 Caption: SGT Morgan Lawson, SFC Jacob Teske, CAPT Ben Warhank, 1st SGT Miles Boughman
Photo Credits: Matt Nelson
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Image 3 Caption: Water Extraction and Purification Equipment
Photo Credits: Matt Nelson
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Image 4 Caption: Hippo Truck
