MORGANTOWN — The Morgantown Utility Board is working with manufacturer AERZEN to determine exactly why a blower unit burst into flames at MUB’s Star City Wastewater Treatment Plant on April 6.
Greg Shellito, manager of treatment and production, said the unit was installed as part of the plant’s recent upgrades and was used as part of a three-unit rotation to provide pressurized air to the plant’s membrane bioreactor aeration tank.
“We rotate them in and out. I think that unit had about 9,000 operation hours on it. At that rate, as long as we do the correct preventative maintenance, which we always do, I would have expected that it would last several decades,” he said.
MUB General Manager Mike McNulty said there are also questions about why the unit didn’t shut itself down before catching fire.
He said AERZEN intends to pull data from the plant’s SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) system to evaluate how the unit was performing prior to failure.
“Our insurance company is heavily involved at the moment, but we have to move forward regardless, and we’ll sort those details out of who is going to be responsible for what, but at this point it is an information gathering process and we are moving ahead,” he said.
It’s estimated that it will cost about $300,000 to purchase and install a new unit.
But the burned-up blower is only part of the story.
The utility’s board of directors said it intends to honor MUB employees Brandon Wilson, Adam Crawford and Vince Walick for taking up fire extinguishers and fighting the flames until the Star City Volunteer Fire Department arrived on the scene.
“You can’t speak enough about what they saved,” McNulty said. “That took a lot of guts to go in that building and shut that power down and do what they did.”
MUB member Erik Carlson agreed.
“I shudder to think what would have happened had that fire been able to spread, but my God, for them to put themselves on the line to keep it from doing so, it’s incredibly impressive,” he said. “I’m so grateful nothing happened to them.”
