Treatment of Water and Wastewater and Lab

Course Description

Treatment of Water and Wastewater and Lab covers source water characteristics, the treatment processes used in drinking water and wastewater facilities, treatment goals, and the process control techniques operators use to keep a plant within its permit. It is explicitly vocational in aim: it prepares technicians for careers in water and wastewater treatment.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, EVS is the Environmental Science prefix. Daytona State publishes it at 3 credits with a $30 lab fee, offered in summer, prerequisites CHM1025C, EVS2026C, MAC1105, and SWS2007. The C suffix marks a combined lecture-and-laboratory format, giving approximately 60 contact hours.

This is one of the more directly employable courses in a college catalog, and the reason is structural: Florida requires water and wastewater treatment plant operators to be licensed, every municipality and utility in the state needs them, the existing workforce is ageing toward retirement, and the work cannot be relocated or automated away. A plant runs every hour of every day whether or not the economy is good.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Describe the hydrologic cycle and the characteristics of surface water and groundwater sources.
• Describe raw water quality parameters and the contaminants each treatment process targets.
• Describe the drinking water treatment train: coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration, and disinfection.
• Explain coagulation and flocculation chemistry and perform jar testing to determine dosage.
• Describe sedimentation and clarifier operation, including detention time and surface loading.
• Describe filtration media, operation, backwashing, and filter performance monitoring.
• Describe disinfection methods, chlorine chemistry, breakpoint chlorination, and contact time requirements.
• Describe disinfection by-products and the trade-off between disinfection and by-product formation.
• Describe softening, aeration, and other treatment processes used for Florida groundwater.
• Describe the wastewater treatment train: preliminary, primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment.
• Explain biological treatment, including activated sludge and fixed-film processes.
• Describe nutrient removal for nitrogen and phosphorus and why it matters in Florida.
• Describe solids handling: thickening, digestion, dewatering, and disposal or reuse.
• Describe reclaimed water production, standards, and reuse applications.
• Perform standard process control laboratory tests and interpret the results.
• Perform process control calculations: dosage, detention time, loading rates, flow, and efficiency.
• Diagnose common process upsets and select corrective action.
• Describe monitoring, sampling, reporting, and recordkeeping requirements.
• Describe the regulatory framework governing drinking water and wastewater and the operator's role in compliance.
• Apply plant safety practices, including confined space, chlorine handling, and biological hazards.

Optional Outcomes

• Describe membrane processes, including reverse osmosis and desalination.
• Describe advanced oxidation and emerging contaminant treatment.
• Describe SCADA and instrumentation in plant operation.
• Describe distribution system and collection system operation.
• Describe industrial pretreatment programmes.
• Tour an operating treatment facility and describe its process train.
• Prepare for the Florida operator licensing examination.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Water sources and raw water characteristics
• Treatment goals and target contaminants
• Coagulation, flocculation, and jar testing
• Sedimentation and clarifiers
• Filtration and backwashing
• Disinfection, chlorine chemistry, and contact time
• Disinfection by-products
• Softening, aeration, and groundwater treatment
• Wastewater preliminary and primary treatment
• Activated sludge and fixed-film biological treatment
• Nutrient removal: nitrogen and phosphorus
• Solids handling and biosolids
• Reclaimed water and reuse
• Process control laboratory testing
• Process control calculations
• Troubleshooting process upsets
• Monitoring, sampling, and reporting
• Regulatory framework and compliance
• Plant safety

Optional Topics

• Membranes, reverse osmosis, and desalination
• Advanced oxidation and emerging contaminants
• SCADA and instrumentation
• Distribution and collection systems
• Industrial pretreatment
• Facility tours
• Operator licensing examination preparation

Resources & Tools

• California State University Sacramento (Office of Water Programs) operator training manuals — Water Treatment Plant Operation and Operation of Wastewater Treatment Plants. These are the operator training standard nationally and are what most licence candidates actually study from.
• AWWA (American Water Works Association) — Water Treatment and the Principles and Practices series, plus the Water Sourcebooks.
• WEF (Water Environment Federation) — the wastewater counterpart, including Operation of Municipal Wastewater Treatment Plants.
• Florida DEP Drinking Water and Domestic Wastewater programmes (floridadep.gov) — free: licensing requirements, examination content outlines, application forms, and the rules themselves.
• Florida Administrative Code Chapters 62-550, 62-555, 62-600, 62-610, and 62-602 — free on flrules.org; drinking water standards, wastewater facilities, reuse, and operator certification respectively.
• EPA drinking water regulations and the Safe Drinking Water Act — free, and the federal floor the state builds on.
• Standard Methods for the Examination of Water and Wastewater — the analytical authority; consult your library rather than buying it.
• Florida Water & Pollution Control Operators Association (FW&PCOA) and the Florida Section AWWA — training courses, examination review, and the professional network that actually gets people hired.
• Laboratory equipment as supplied: jar test apparatus, turbidimeter, DO meter, pH meter, settleometer, microscope for activated sludge examination.

Career Pathways

• Water treatment plant operator — licensed, municipal or utility employment; the direct destination.
• Wastewater treatment plant operator — same structure, separate licence, frequently better paid at equivalent class.
• Distribution and collection system operator — separate Florida certifications covering the pipes rather than the plant.
• Plant laboratory analyst — process control and compliance testing.
• Industrial wastewater operator — manufacturing, food processing, and power generation all run their own treatment.
• Utility maintenance and instrumentation technician — pairs naturally with PLC and SCADA skills.
• Regulatory inspector — Florida DEP and county health departments.
• Plant supervisor and utility manager — the standard promotion path, driven by licence class and experience.
• Consulting and contract operations — firms operate plants for small municipalities under contract.
• SOC code 51-8031 Water and Wastewater Treatment Plant and System Operators. Employment is stable, geographically distributed across all 67 Florida counties, public-sector with Florida Retirement System participation in many cases, and structurally short of candidates as the existing workforce retires.

Special Information

⚠ Florida licenses operators — understand the ladder before you graduate

The single most important practical content for anyone taking this course with a career in mind.

You cannot operate a Florida treatment plant without a licence. The Florida Department of Environmental Protection certifies drinking water and domestic wastewater treatment plant operators under Chapter 62-602, Florida Administrative Code, in classes — commonly Class C through Class A, with C the entry level and A the highest. Higher classes permit operation of larger and more complex facilities and command higher pay.

What the structure means for a student:

• Drinking water and wastewater are separate licences. Holding one does not confer the other, and many operators eventually hold both, which makes them substantially more employable.
• Licensure requires education, experience, and an examination — the experience component means you generally cannot walk from a classroom to a licence, and entry is usually as a trainee or operator-in-training while accruing hours.
• Approved coursework can count toward the requirements, which is precisely why courses like this exist. Ask your programme specifically whether it is DEP-approved for that purpose and how many hours it contributes.
• Advancement is by licence class, so the pay ladder is explicit and predictable rather than negotiated — an unusual and genuinely good feature of this career.
• Continuing education is required to renew, and the operator associations exist substantially to provide it.

The practical advice: contact your regional DEP office or your programme's coordinator early and get the requirements in writing, then plan the experience hours deliberately — a plant trainee position while still studying is the fastest route in. Rule 11 applies: licensing rules, classes, and examination content are amended, so verify current requirements at the source rather than relying on any guide.

⚠ Process control is arithmetic, and the licensing exam is largely arithmetic

Worth stating plainly because students underestimate it and then fail the exam on it.

Operating a plant means calculating continuously — chemical dosage, detention time, surface loading rate, filter backwash rate, solids retention time, food-to-microorganism ratio, removal efficiency, and flow conversions. The MAC1105 prerequisite is there because the arithmetic is relentless rather than difficult.

The skills that actually decide outcomes:

• Unit conversion is the most common failure point — million gallons per day to gallons per minute, milligrams per litre to pounds per day, cubic feet to gallons. Practise until the conversions are automatic.
• The pounds formula — flow (MGD) × concentration (mg/L) × 8.34 — is the workhorse of the field and appears on every operator examination in some form.
• Detention time, loading rates, and efficiency follow the same pattern: identify what is being asked, get the units consistent, apply the formula.
• Sanity-check every answer. An operator who calculates a chlorine dose two orders of magnitude wrong and does not notice is a hazard, and this is exactly the reasoning the exam is testing.
• Learn the formula sheet you will be given — Florida's examinations supply one, and knowing which formula to reach for is the actual skill.

The connected laboratory skill: jar testing is the practical embodiment of the same reasoning, determining the coagulant dose empirically rather than theoretically. It is the classic operator laboratory exercise and it is genuinely used every day at real plants when raw water quality shifts.

⚠ Plant safety: chlorine, confined spaces, and pathogens

Water and wastewater treatment carries hazards that have killed operators, and each has a specific control regime.

• Chlorine gas is lethal at low concentrations and heavier than air, so it accumulates in low places. Facilities using gas chlorine require detection, ventilation, emergency repair kits, and self-contained breathing apparatus with trained users. Many utilities have moved to sodium or calcium hypochlorite specifically to remove this hazard — which is the hierarchy of controls working as intended.
• Confined space entry is the classic fatal hazard in this industry, and the fatalities characteristically come in twos and threes because would-be rescuers enter and are overcome. Digesters, wet wells, manholes, and tanks can be oxygen-deficient or contain hydrogen sulfide or methane. Permit-required confined space procedures (OSHA 29 CFR 1910.146) are not paperwork: test the atmosphere, ventilate, attend from outside, and never enter to rescue without equipment and training.
• Hydrogen sulfide deserves separate mention because it deadens the sense of smell at dangerous concentrations — the disappearance of the rotten-egg odour is a warning sign, not reassurance.
• Biological hazards in wastewater are real: hepatitis A and tetanus vaccination are standard, hand hygiene matters, and cuts should be covered and cleaned. The risk is manageable and should not be dramatized, but it should not be ignored either.
• Other standard hazards — slips on wet surfaces, drowning in open tanks, rotating equipment, and electrical work in a wet environment.

The professional culture point: plants that treat safety procedure as optional have accidents, and the industry's incident record is well documented. Learning these habits in a teaching laboratory is the intended purpose of the lab component.

⚠ Florida's water situation makes this work locally consequential

Context that explains why the state invests in these programmes.

• The Floridan aquifer supplies most of the state's drinking water, and much of that groundwater is hard and high in hydrogen sulfide — which is why aeration and softening feature more prominently in Florida treatment than in states drawing on surface water.
• Nutrient removal is a Florida priority, not a technical nicety. Nitrogen and phosphorus discharged to Florida's springs, lagoons, and lakes drive algal blooms with documented ecological and economic consequences, and the state has imposed nutrient limits accordingly.
• Florida is a national leader in reclaimed water. Reuse for irrigation, industrial supply, and aquifer recharge is widespread, and Chapter 62-610, F.A.C. sets standards specific to it. An operator who understands reuse is more employable here than almost anywhere else.
• Saltwater intrusion in coastal well fields has pushed utilities toward brackish water reverse osmosis and desalination, which is a growing specialization.
• Growth pressure is continuous — Florida's population increase means plant expansion, new facilities, and steady demand for licensed operators.
• Hurricanes stress the system. Power loss, flooding, and infiltration into collection systems create emergency conditions, and operators are essential personnel who work through storms. That is a real feature of the job and worth knowing before choosing it.

⚠ The unglamorous case for this career, stated honestly

Worth making explicitly, because the work is invisible and students discount it.

The advantages are genuine and unusual: licensure creates a barrier to entry that protects wages; every community needs it, so employment is geographically flexible across all of Florida; public-sector employment frequently brings Florida Retirement System participation and benefits; advancement is explicit through licence class rather than dependent on politics; and the work cannot be outsourced or automated away — a plant needs a licensed human on site.

The trade-offs are equally real: shift work, including nights, weekends, and holidays, because plants run continuously; on-call and emergency response, including during storms; the environment is wet, noisy, and at a wastewater plant genuinely unpleasant at times; and the responsibility is serious — an operator's decisions affect public health directly, and a failure at a drinking water plant is a public health event.

The framing worth carrying: this is skilled public health work that happens to be classified as a trade. The operators who take it that way tend to be the ones who advance.

Course format and transfer

EVS2005C is 3 credits with an estimated 60 contact hours and a $30 lab fee, offered in summer at Daytona State. The C suffix means combined lecture and laboratory: expect process control laboratory testing, jar tests, settleometer and microscopic examination of activated sludge, and a substantial amount of calculation practice. Facility tours are common and are worth attending — seeing a plant makes the process train comprehensible in a way diagrams do not.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

Transfer note specific to this course: it sits in an applied A.S. pathway, and A.S. degrees do not carry the A.A.'s guaranteed junior-status transfer. That matters less here than usual, because the value of this course is the licence it feeds, not the credit it transfers. Confirm with Florida DEP how the coursework counts toward operator certification requirements, and get that answer in writing — it is the question that determines whether the course did its job.