This is the closest the City of Winchester and the Winchester Municipal Utilities have come to a consent decree deadline, but the Lower Howard’s Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant will still be operating prior to the Jan. 1 deadline.
Flow will be cut from pump stations and transitioned to the plant beginning Monday. While that is a six- to eight-week process, WMU General Manager Mike Flynn said, the deadline for eliminating the sanitary sewer overflow will still be met, thanks to a back-up plan.
“All the tie-overs won’t be completed by Jan. 31. What we’ve done is have a safety factor in meeting that. We’re going to have backup pumping set up at each pump station in the event we have a large rain event or something,” Flynn said. “We’ll be able to pump extraneous flow from those pump stations to the newly constructed line, which will go to the new plant.”
Flynn called the plan a “fail-safe,” but WMU still plans to have most of the flow moving to the plant and the pump stations at Snowfall and Stonybrook offline.
Those two had to be removed as part of the consent decree from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after the agency filed complaints against Winchester and WMU for violating the Clean Water Act.
In 2007, the Winchester and WMU entered into the consent decree with the EPA, which requires both boards to improve the wastewater collection system and eliminate sewer overflows.
The consent decree agreement runs through 2025 and still has deadlines looming to remove the remaining sewer overflows.
The next deadline on the list will be a little roomier. WMU must eliminate the Bel Air pump station by July 31, but that project is already more than 80 percent complete, according to Flynn. Bel Air will be offline next week, giving WMU plenty of time before the next hard deadline in 2021.
WMU faced deadlines in quick succession recently, including the Jan. 31 and July 31 deadlines. The latest, the Lower Howard’s Creek plant, was a tight squeeze.
“This project is the tightest we’ve run up on a deadline,” Flynn said. “We had a two-year window to construct all of this, including designing and constructing. We had to compress the schedule to meet these deadlines.”
The new plant required the construction of three miles of gravity sewer ranging from 15-inch to 42-inch pipe and a force main nearly three miles long with 24-inch PVC. The plant itself also had to be built.
While WMU now has some time to breathe, Flynn said there likely won’t be much resting. The usual operation and maintenance of infrastructure must continue.
“We’re still going to look at neighborhood rehab projects to improve the sanitary sewer projects,” he said. “Infrastructure renewal is always key to the operation of any utility.”
The 2021 deadline, while a bit off in the distance, will still require a large project to meet. That deadline is for sewer overflows on Madison¿Avenue, Flanagan Street and East Washington Street.
“That will be a big downtown project,” Flynn said. “It will be a very in depth project and very costly.”
Contact Casey Castle at ccastle@winchestersun.com.
