A sewage treatment plant turns excess liquid into snow

WOLFEBORO, N.H. -- These 30-foot-high mounds of snow didn't fall from the sky.

The ''e-snow" or ''effluent snow" is the result of pumping 2.5 million gallons of liquid from the storage lagoons at the town's sewer treatment facility through snow-making guns. The goal is to improve the storage capacity of the lagoons, whose levels are more than 25 percent higher than last year due to heavy rains last fall.

''It's not the ultimate solution to our problems, but it helps us make the best use of our existing treatment capacity," said Scott Lees, the town's director of water and sewer utilities.

The effluent, a mixture of water and solids that has been treated at the plant, is held in five lagoons and eventually turned into compost.

But the amount of waste water coming in is exceeding the plant's storage capacity, resulting in an order last April barring new sewer hookups until the town upgrades its waste water treatment plant.

The giant ice mounds won't fully melt until late June and will slowly release water into the ground during the spring and early summer.