Goleta Sanitation District's Water Resource Recovery Facility serves 95,000 residents along the central coast of California, neighboring the city of Santa Barbara. The WRRF has a design treatment capacity of 9.5 mgd dry weather flow, treating 4.2 mgd on average. Built in the late 1940s, GSD has continuously evolved to meet regulations, population and economic growth.
Like most WRRFs, GSD navigates the operational upsets that soaps, detergents and disinfectants create for biological wastewater treatment. When COVID-19 arrived in March 2020, the district faced the perfect storm of drought conditions reducing influent flow and higher concentrations of surfactants, like quaternary ammonia compounds,
