It’s a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it.
Some of the town’s sewer pump stations have been in active service since they were built in 1930s and 40s. In response, the Bethlehem Town Board passed a bond resolution to the order of $5.2 million during its Tuesday, April 15, meeting in order to update the outdated wastewater stations.
Maintenance of the stations has become costly, and the mix-and-match of sewer pumps over the coarse of half a century is far from uniform, making it harder for new workers to be proficient in maintaining the aging infrastructure.
The improvements are necessary, according to Supervisor Jack Cunningham, and will improve conditions for town workers, said Commissioner of Public Works Josh Cansler, and create a safer work environment and more reliable service for residents, they both concluded.
People don’t want to invest their tax dollars into something they can’t see but they get upset if something goes wrong,` Cansler told Spotlight Newspapers during a guided tour of the town’s sewer pump stations.
If things go wrong with the pump stations, he said, everything that flows out of a house could potentially flow back in very quickly. In essence, one could be up that well-known proverbial creek without a paddle.
`If these pumps failed, the sewer would back up into the homes eventually and fill up a basement` Cansler said. `Obviously nobody wants their basement flooded with sewage.`
One of the original stations is the Elsmere pump station, built in the 1930s, although it has had some equipment upgrades since, according to Cansler.
`Our workforce is getting older and they’ll be taking a lot of knowledge with them when they go,` Cansler said of the need to have sewer station conformity. `Right now just about every station is different.`
As it stands now, the town board authorized the town to bid out the work to replace seven pump stations, three this year and four next. Cunningham said there are only estimated costs at this time because a bid has yet to be awarded, but that it will most likely cost a household within the sewer districts about $20 a year for the next 30 years.
Payments wouldn’t start until construction is completed in two years, he added.
`It will only affect people who have sewer service, not those with a septic,` said Cunningham. `Some of them [sewer stations] absolutely need it there will be long-term costs savings in doing this.`
Proper planning now will prevent problems in the future, according to Charles Wickham, director of field operation for the town’s Department of Public Works.
`You wouldn’t believe what people flush down their toilets. It costs us big time in maintenance,` said Wickham. `We’ve learned a lot the hard way, so with the new stations we’re trying to put in a lot of thought before hand.`
With the newer stations sewer pumps can be `swapped` within an hour, said Wickham, but with the older ones, `it’s an all-day project.`
Pointing to two silver trash cans at the top of a crate at the Hudson Avenue station, which was built in 1929 or 1930,Wickham joked, `You don’t even want to know what’s in there.`
Cansler said the town needs to establish a program to replace the pumps every couple of years so they don’t run into the problems the did in the 1970s when federal funding allowed them to build and replace several stations around town.
Now that the funding is gone, all of the pumps built then are all ready for repairs and replacement at the same time.
`The design life for these stations are about 20 or 30 years,` Cansler said. `In a lot of cases now, we’re just using a Band-Aid.`
The town has only built two new stations in the past 20 years, according to Cansler, and town workers have to physically visit the older plants three times a week to inspect them, which is costly and inefficient if a problem occurs right after an inspection.
If that happened it would be three days before anyone knew, or, if the problem were bad enough, residents would be calling the town.
The solution, he says, is Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA.
Part of the upgrades to the town’s sewer stations is going to include installing SCADA into each station around town, which will allow workers to monitor each one from a remote location.
`By 2010,` Cansler said, `our goal is to have them in all the stations.`
SCADA is an industrial control system meant to function across a wide area with an autonomous microprocessor controlled electronic device that will be used to monitor all of the stations and let the town know where there is a problem and what the problem is.
`The SCADA system will eliminate a lot of these problems,` Cunningham said. `To me, one of the bigger things in this upgrade project is getting everything on this system.` “