The City of Salem’s Willow Lake Water Pollution Control Facility provides wastewater treatment services to the Salem-Keizer metropolitan area and operates under authority of an Oregon Department of Environmental Quality (ODEQ) administered Federal National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Permit.

The City embarked on a multi-year pilot project to determine whether a constructed wetland approach – a Natural Reclamation System (NRS) – could provide a new way of treating wastewater by using natural systems to polish the effluent.  The pilot project allowed the City to obtain necessary data to qualify the use of full-scale wetlands, while at the same time illustrated the benefit of the NRS to both the community and the environment. 

The mission of the NRS was to demonstrate the use of natural systems as a sustainable method of polishing effluent, improving water quality, and providing reclaimed water supply and management, as well as determining whether the process is appropriate within the Willamette River watershed.

Understanding the magnitude of data to be compiled and analyzed to determine the success of the NRS, the City needed a data management product that could capture the data from multiple sources, store the significant amount of data, and report the data in a format that could be easily used for numerous analyses.

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