Livingston officials praise wastewater team after mechanical failure, say effluent remained in permit

City officials on Tuesday heard a detailed account of an October 2024 mechanical failure at the Livingston Water Reclamation Facility and were told plant staff kept treated effluent within permit limits while restoring full operations.

The update, delivered by wastewater staff and city management, described a broken decanter arm and mixer that forced the plant into single‑basin operation, a labor‑intensive solids removal effort, supply and shipping delays for replacement parts, and steps taken to strengthen mounts and aeration piping. City officials said the plant’s effluent quality has improved since repairs and that staff purposefully seeded the basin with high‑quality sludge to restore biology before returning to normal operations.

The work mattered, officials said, because treated water from the plant discharges to the Yellowstone River downstream from other communities and must meet permit standards. City Manager Mister Gager told commissioners the operations team “kept our effluent that goes into our precious Yellowstone River within our permit this whole time,” and said he appreciated the crew’s work during a difficult period.

Trace Tidwell, the wastewater superintendent, described the failure and the recovery timeline to the commission. “The effluent quality has improved to better conditions than what we had when I first started working there,” Tidwell said, and outlined repairs: a new mixer arm rated to 240% of the force expected, replacement aeration membrane sections, and removal of accumulated grit and solids that had built up in the basins.

Tidwell said the initial failure left one basin out of service and required controlled “wasting” of solids through the plant’s normal solids‑handling process rather than trucking sludge away. He said crews accepted 44,000 gallons of seeded waste activated sludge from Bozeman to accelerate biological recovery and that operators had to manually calculate pumping and wasting rates while the plant ran on a single basin.

Staff described vendor and shipping problems: an early aeration pipe shipment did not match specifications and had to be returned; tariffs and long lead times added delays. Contractors AE2S Engineering and Anderson Construction assisted with inspections and mechanical repairs. Tidwell thanked other city staff who volunteered time on the recovery and said the plant is better organized for the next planned outage.

Commissioners asked operational questions about peak flows and automation. Tidwell said the plant’s design maximum daily flow is about 2.7 million gallons; during a prior flood event, infiltration and inflow nearly doubled inflow rates and forced much of the plant into manual mode. He said automation improvements since 2022 have strengthened the plant’s ability to respond to high flows.

Tidwell and Jay Taylor, who runs solids handling, described the physical labor of extracting grit and solids from the basin and credited temporary help from other departments and visiting engineers. Taylor and lab operator Nathan McClure were among staff recognized by the city manager for their sustained work during the incident.

Commissioners thanked the operations team for the multi‑day recovery, praised the improved effluent results and asked staff to continue reporting back on planned maintenance. Tidwell invited commissioners and residents to tour the plant; staff said public and school tours are regularly scheduled.

The commission did not take formal action on the update but directed staff to continue monitoring performance and to return with any capital improvement needs tied to recent failures.