Centreville Sewage Treatment Plant an Unlikely Success Story

Back when Centreville was just a lonely freeway gasoline stop and crazy development was still years off, regional planners were wrestling with a nasty man-made problem that threatened everything—untreated sewage was spoiling the countryside and fouling the area’s drinking supply.

 In the late 1960s things were really bad, green algae blooms were suffocating the Occoquan Reservoir—one of the area’s main water supplies. Fish kills were common and finally the state of Virginia stepped in and ordered a moratorium on new development until community officials could clean up the mess.

The problems were traced to a series of 11 poorly operating secondary sewage treatment plants in the Centreville area spewing nasty stuff into the watershed that was draining into the reservoir. The solution was both technically advanced for its time and highly controversial.

The 11 plants would be shut down and replaced with a massive regional plant operated by the multi-jurisdictional Upper Occoquan Service Authority. The controversial part is what they were going to do with the treated sewage: it would be pumped into the watershed, flow into the reservoir and finally end up as tap water for a morning cup of coffee back in Centreville. 

Community protests against such a partially closed system were pretty strident, said Mike Reach, deputy executive director at the authority. People were naturally skeptical about a plant designed to dump treated sewer water (in reality very highly treated water) back into the drinking water system.

Actually, the 11 badly performing plants were already doing that. The new plant was just going to do it right, Reach said.

“It was a real eye-popper to me,” Reach said. “The old plants had been discharging into the reservoir for years.”

The regional authority moved ahead and opened the plant in 1978 on 470 acres in a corner of Centreville along Compton Road. What happened next can only be described as one of the area’s biggest success stories that few have heard about.

The formal name of the plant is the Millard H. Robbins Jr., Regional Water Reclamation Plant (it was named after the authority’s first executive director), which over the past 33 years has quietly become a national model. It has done it through technical superiority and the production of treated water that meets the strictest standards in the country, Reach said. The plant serves residents in Fairfax and Prince William counties as well as homes in Manassas and Manassas Park.

As a result of the award-winning treatment process, water in the reservoir is clean, the days of fish kills and algae blooms are long over. Processing at the sewage plant isn’t quick. In general ballpark terms, it takes about 24 hours for a drop of water to go completely through the plant, Reach said, and another 30 days until it reaches the county’s water intakes off the reservoir near Lorton. Plus, the plant acts as a buffer against dry times, when it is able to supply 80 percent of the reservoir’s drinking water needs, Reach said.

The plant is so low-key that some residents with homes near the site don’t realize they are living within a stones-throw of a massive sewer treatment facility. It doesn’t smell and the plant’s ‘finishing pond,’ the final stop before the water is dumped into a causeway headed for the reservoir, is a popular local fishing hole.

The understated approach is by design, Reach said.

“We don’t need to advertise for customers,” Reach said. “Sewerage is a fact of life. But this was a smart solution. When they designed this plant, they really hit a home run.”