Urban stormwater runoff treatment of Nainital Lake’s catchment: an application of ballasted sand flocculation technology

Abstract

Stormwater runoffs are one of the primary causes for deteriorating water quality in the Nainital Lake, India – a prominent tourist attraction and the sole drinking water source for the habitants of Nainital City. Treatment of fluctuating runoffs and contaminant influxes before mixing with the lake’s water by conventional methods would require a large land footprint, which is a big constraint in the Nainital because of the hilly region. Ballasted sand flocculation (BSF) technology requires much less land footprint; a full-scale 1 MLD capacity pilot plant was applied for treatment of stormwater runoffs of the Nainital Lake. Twenty-eight storm events were monitored for runoff characterization and for evaluating the performance of BSF technology. The runoff water showed marked variation especially for total suspended solids (TSS), total phosphorus (TP), chemical oxygen demand (COD), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), total coliform (TC) and fecal coliform (FC) with maximum concentrations of 964 mg/l, 2.35 mg/l, 520 mg/l, 299 mg/l, 21 × 105 MPN/100 ml and 14 × 104 MPN/100 ml. The performance analyses results of the pilot plant revealed that the contaminants including trace metals in the stormwater runoff were reduced appreciably and the pollutant removal efficiencies were found to be largely unaffected by fluctuation of the influent contaminants’ concentration.