District must do all it can to keep Flathead Lake blue
A pair of paddleboarders navigate around Flathead Lake at Somers Beach State Park on Friday, Aug. 22, 2025. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
It’s not often that wastewater treatment gets a lot of press attention, but in recent weeks this has been the case in the Flathead Valley. And for good reason, as stringent wastewater treatment is crucial to protect our community’s most valuable asset – the crystal-clear blue waters of Flathead Lake and its watershed.
Some of the headlines reported the opening of the new membrane bioreactor plant at the Flathead Lake Biological Station. Indeed, we were proud to bring this unit online, replacing our stalwart sequencing batch reactor unit that was installed in the mid 1970s. It was the first advanced wastewater treatment plant in the Flathead to include tertiary treatment to reduce phosphorus emissions to low levels. Phosphorus is the nutrient that at higher levels could turn Flathead Lake from clear blue to cloudy green from algae.
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