The continued shutdown of Albany’s Talking Water Gardens as a wastewater treatment system defies common sense. So I asked the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality to explain.
The constructed wetlands was completed in 2012 in order to cool and further treat water from the Albany-Millersburg sewage treatment plant. With a capacity of about 12 million gallons a day, the Gardens leaked an estimated 400,000 gallons a day to adjacent creeks and lakes that feed the Willamette River.
To settle a compliance case against the city by the DEQ, no water has been pumped into the wetlands since December 2024. Instead the effluent from the sewage plant now goes directly into the river…