How is the water treated in a water treatment plant?

Each Water treatment facility is designed for the water it is treating.

The water treatment plant near my home is fairly simple considering it provides water to about 200,000 people.

The water is pumped in from the River and checked for contaminants the plant can't clean up. Chemicals and oil for example.

It goes through a three part filter. If you watch the Water Filter pitcher adds on TV its quite similar on a huge scale. They use a bed of Gravel with finer gravel on top with the final layer being activated Charcoal.

Once it has gone through the filter it gets treated with Chlorine checked for the 10 th time and pumped into the system.

Optional depending on what the source water are things like a tank for chemical precipitation of dissolved solids. Fluoride treatment and a bunch of other things.

In some cases:If the water is particularly bad or in an Emergency reverse osmosis is used on large scale systems.

The Canadian Government maintains a system in several shipping containers for deployment all over the world.