What Happened?
The efficiency of a city’s water system is a top priority for delivery services as well as eliminating wasteful spending. To keep water systems in top notch, many municipalities are taking advantage of grant programs and new technologies to support maintenance and innovation projects.
Havre
The Montana Department of Commerce awarded Havre with a $500,000 grant to improve its wastewater system. Administered through the Treasure State Endowment Program, the grant will help the city make critical improvements to its wastewater infrastructure for long-term safety and reliability, Great Falls Tribune reported.
Havre is leveraging the grant, as well as several other funding opportunities from state and federal agencies, to rehabilitate its existing wastewater treatment plant as well as expand its capabilities with a new UV disinfection resource. The city will also conduct an inflow and infiltration study to identify the immediate and long-term needs to ensure compliance with current regulations, Great Falls Tribune reported.
Missouri
The Missouri Department of Natural Resources is dedicating $1.1 million in Small Community Engineering Assistance Program grants to several cities throughout the state. The grant program is designed to help municipalities, counties, public sewer or water districts and other agencies with funding to cover engineering costs incurred in preparation of a facility plan. The grant will cover 80 percent of the costs, with the local agency covering the remaining 20 percent. More disadvantaged communities in the state are eligible for a 90 percent grant requiring a 10 percent match.
Willard, for example, will use its $40,000 grant to address issues with stormwater entering its wastewater collection system. If left unattended the wastewater system will overflow and release untreated water into a nearby watershed and impact drinking and recreation water sources, KSMU reported.
Sacramento
Sacramento is embarking on a major upgrade to its sewage treatment plant that will cost an estimated $2 billion while creating 600 construction jobs. The sewage treatment plant is expected to be the largest project in Sacramento County history as the facility will service more than 1.5 million customers in the region, KCRA reported.
The existing sewage treatment plant was found to be discharging water into the Sacramento River with high levels of ammonia, nitrates and other pollutants. Thus, the plant overhaul will include building a biological nutrient removal facility that leverages bacteria and microbes to ingest ammonia during the treatment process. The project also calls for adding a disinfectant process to the facility to further improve the safety of local drinking water, KCRA reported.
Arlington
In Arlington, Texas, a reported 2 billion gallons - or 12 percent – of the city’s drinking water is wasted each year. This lost resource can be attributed to a number of water system failures such as main breaks or errors in construction projects. Preserving just 1 percent of the city’s water loss, however, could save Arlington $300,000 annually, the Star-Telegram reported.
To effectively reduce the amount of water lost before it reaches the customers, the city is undergoing significant infrastructure improvements that will reduce the number of water outages while more timely maintenance will cut costs and the need of emergency repairs. The infrastructure improvement projects include:
- Replacing aging and brittle concrete water lines
- Manually inspecting thousands of water main valves
- Using robots and high-resolution cameras with sensors to detect leaks and flaws in the wipes from above ground
Furthermore, Arlington is riddled with concrete pipes that are brittle and crack easily when the ground shifts. The city is planning to replace many sections of water piping with more flexible plastic or metal pipes that will withstand ground movements more effectively, the Star-Telegram reported.
In addition, over the next three years Arlington will be locating and inspecting all 18,000 water main valves in the city to ensure they are operating properly. Checking the valves to see if they open and close will reduce the number of water main breaks that waste significant water and create outages in the community, the Star-Telegram reported.
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