Chronicle Editorial, The Chronicle , September 1997
Water quantity and quality are two factors that play an enormous role in how much, where and how well a community grows.
And community leaders in Centralia are wisely and prudently paying increasing attention to meeting water needs as the city takes proactive measures to both encourage and facilitate a major spurt in economic growth.
The focus of action is the Centralia Port District that borders the northwest side of town in the Fords Prairie area.
The city is aggressively moving to provide utility services that will accommodate major new clients at the port, starting with Draper Valley Farms that expects to site a $10 million, 300-job fryer processing plant on port property in the next year
To assure water needs for now and the future are met for commercial, industrial and residential customers, the city, in an efficiency move, is acting to maximize use of its existing wells, rather than digging new ones or looking for other water sources. To wit, the city is working to bring on line the so-called 'Tennis Court Well" at Borst Park and to put its Eshom well back on line.
The Borst well will require a treatment plant so that water meets federal and state quality standards. Indications are it could produce up to 2.5 million gallons per day, in itself more than doubling the city's current average daily water usage.
If contamination problems at Eshom well can be overcome, the two wells combined with current sources could boost the city's capacity to 4.6 million gallons per day 'Mat would be well beyond the current usage in the city plus the 800,000 gallons per day the Draper plant will draw, leaving considerable capacity to meet growth needs.
More reliance on wells and ground water for the city's supply focuses renewed attention on the issue of protecting that source. The experience from contamination from septic systems in the absence of sewer hookups and the longtime building moratorium that has been placed on Waunch Prairie as a result is a reminder of what's at stake.
Protecting our ground water aquifers such as underlie the two main growth areas for Centralia - on Fords and Waunch prairies is absolutely critical because if they became contaminated it might be permanent, at great risk to public health and adequate water supplies.
Another major water quality issue the city is moving to address is adequate, lawful treatment and disposal of its growing wastewater volume that will increase dramatically when Draper Valley comes on line.
The current plant, built in 1950, has increasing maintenance costs, is highly floodprone on the banks of the Chehalis River and essentially is totally inadequate to accommodate growth in volume.
Accordingly, the city is taking aggressive action to replace it with a modem facility that is farther away from flood threat and attendant pollution, out of the path of Interstate 5 widening and at a location that will allow discharge of the plant's effluent downstream from the polluted portion of the Chehalis River between the Twin Cities, so as not to add further to that problem and to more easily comply with new discharge regulations.
A prospective new location is on property on Fords Prairie adjacent to the port that would be another advantage as that's where much of the new volume of wastewater would be generated.
The city just this week contracted for an environmental analysis of the site, with a facilities plan, including costs, to follow.
Along the way, the city and port need to ensure there's plenty of opportunity for public comment on these growth support measures to help ensure they are cost effective, as environmentally friendly as possible, compatible with the area's capacity to support growth and gain broad community support.