Behind The Scenes

Celebrating LCA’s Unsung Heroes for Engineers Week

The next time you wash the dishes, grab a drink from the tap, take a shower, use the toilet, or do your laundry … thank one of LCA’s engineers! Most of us don’t realize it, but if it weren’t for engineers, our water and wastewater couldn’t get from Point A to Point B. That’s why…

A group of interns in blue LCA shirts pose at the Allentown Water Filtration Plant. The photo illustrates a story on Lehigh County Authority's internship program.

LCA Internship Program Helps Students Dive Into Fulfilling Careers

(Above, LCA’s 2025 interns pose for a photo at the Allentown Water Filtration Plant. Back, from left: Grace Trautwein, Caitlin Kirk. Front, from left: Max Moser, Nick Rivera, Aidan Brown, and Logan Statler.) When Caitlin Kirk joined Lehigh County Authority’s internship program, she had no idea how much interdisciplinary knowledge the day-to-day processes of water…

LCA’s CEO Featured on Good Morning Lehigh Valley

Liesel Gross discusses infrastructure upgrades, the role of our treatment plants, stormwater vs. sewer, and more. Our CEO Liesel Gross took to the airwaves recently to talk about all things water on “Good Morning Lehigh Valley,” a new radio show hosted by former Lehigh County Commissioner Brad Osborne. To hear the entire interview, please click…

A picture of LCA employees Dan Stevens, asset management technology manager, and James Luma, GIS specialist, as they look at a computerized map of LCA assets, to illustrate a story on how LCA uses GIS to track assets.

LCA’s GIS Team Creates Digital Maps to Track Water Infrastructure

With more than 1,065 miles of water and sewer lines to manage, it’s a good thing LCA can rely on technology like our geographic information system (GIS) to help us map and track our infrastructure.  It’s also a good thing we have awesome professionals like Dan Stevens (seated in photo), our asset management technology manager, and James Luma,…

Where Does My Drinking Water Come From? How LCA Collects, Treats and Transports Your H2O

Water, Water, Everywhere Clean water is one of those things you take for granted: When you walk into the kitchen and turn on the tap, it just flows out. But did you ever stop to wonder, “How did my water get here? Where does drinking water come from?” Over the next few blog posts, we’ll…

An aerial view of Lehigh County Authority's Industrial Pretreatment Plant in Fogelsville, for a post on industrial waste treatment.

Businesses Create Wastewater, Too — How Does LCA Treat That?

Above, LCA’s Pretreatment Plant in Fogelsville. Last year, we kicked off our Behind The Scenes at LCA series with a number of blog posts detailing the wastewater treatment process. Now we’re kicking off 2020 by adding to that series with a post about another important step in that process: the EPA’s Industrial Pretreatment Program. As…

Disinfection and Testing — the Final Steps in Wastewater Treatment

Over the past several months, we’ve talked about why wastewater must be treated, and detailed each step in the treatment process at Allentown’s Kline’s Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Now we’ve come to the final treatment step: disinfection, in which we use a chlorine solution to kill pathogenic (disease-causing) microorganisms before the wastewater is released into…

Tertiary Nitrification: How Ammonia Is Removed From Wastewater

In our last post, we explained how plastic media filters remove contaminants during secondary treatment. Today we’re going to talk about the next level of treatment, which removes ammonia through a process called tertiary nitrification. As you can see from the picture above, it’s probably not what you imagine when you think of water treatment!…

How Is Liquid Waste Treated? It’s All About Biology

As part of our ongoing series explaining the wastewater treatment process, we’ve discussed how solids are removed from wastewater, how we use waste to create energy, what happens to the byproducts of treatment, and even what happens to things that should not be flushed. Now we’re going to explain what happens to the liquid waste:…

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