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(NEW YORK, NY – April 16, 2009) – The Metropolitan District (MDC), which serves the drinking water and wastewater needs of Hartford, CT, and seven surrounding suburbs, has chosen Hazen and Sawyer for the design and construction administration of upgraded disinfection systems for their East Hartford and Poquonock wastewater treatment plants.

This work is a part of MDC’s consent decree with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for both combined sewer overflows and upgrading wastewater treatment plants, under the Agency’s $2 billion Clean Water Act. The East Hartford and Poquonock plants are designed to treat 12.5 and 5 million gallons of wastewater per day, respectively.

The East Hartford and Poquonock plants currently employ a multi-step process to treat wastewater, including using gaseous chlorine to disinfect the effluent and then dechlorinating it before release into local water bodies. Hazen and Sawyer will study the impacts of upgrading the plants’ disinfection processes to ultraviolet or sodium hypochlorite disinfection, aiming to have the new technology operational by May of 2011.

This represents Hazen and Sawyer’s first work for MDC since MDC chose Hazen and Sawyer as one of its on-call wastewater design firms in December 2007.MDC is a non-profit municipal corporation chartered by the Connecticut General Assembly in 1929 and currently provides quality water supply, water pollution control, mapping, and household hazardous waste collection to approximately 400,000 residents of its eight member municipalities – Bloomfield, East Hartford, Hartford, Newington, Rocky Hill, West Hartford, Wethersfield and Windsor — and to portions of other towns in the region.

For more than half a century, Hazen and Sawyer has focused on two things: providing safe drinking water and controlling water pollution. Our range of services encompasses the planning, design, and construction management of water and wastewater-related projects – from clean water treatment, storage, and distribution to wastewater collection and treatment. Since our founding in 1951, we have grown in size to over 740 employees in 26 offices.