Friday, February 13, 2004
By Dian McClurg dmcclurg@chronline.com, The Chronicle
Centralia hasn't wasted any time with its plans for wastewater treatment.
Two years ago, when the city signed with international contracting giant CH2M Hill, the due date for a new wastewater treatment plant was June 2005.
Dave Reynolds, project manager for CH2M Hill, said the roughly $38 million plant will be ready to treat Centralia's sewer waste before the end of next month.
"We're finishing well ahead of schedule," Reynolds said Thursday.
The city received a $5 million grant and $27 million in zero-interest loans from the Washington Department of Ecology to help pay for this project.
The city had until 2008 to build a new plant, according to an agreement signed with DOE about five years ago.
Centralia also planned ahead by increasing sewer rates in April 2001 to help the city build a reserve in anticipation of making the $112,500 monthly payments on the loan, which start in 2005.
Thursday morning, frost and fog met visitors to the 360-acre site of the former Flying T Ranch on Goodrich Road in Fords Prairie. Centralia bought the ranch in 1999 and has used 20 acres of it for the new wastewater treatment plant.
Centralia Mayor Tim Browning, Chehalis City Councilor Chad Taylor, Centralia Utilities Director Dick Southworth, Reynolds and a number of workers in hard hats met at the new plant Thursday to begin the final and most critical stage in testing the plant's design.
The mayor executed a few clicks on a computer mouse, and everyone watched as a diagram on the computer screen showed the system starting. Pumps began sending raw waste down the four-mile pipe from the Mellen Street site of the old wastewater treatment plant to the new plant for the first time.
For several months, the construction and engineering crew has been testing its work at the plant with clean-water runs. Thursday's run was designed to slowly introduce waste water to the system, and to see how the plant handled it.
About three hours later, the plant's first problem occurred. A link in the long conveyance pipe sprung a leak and spilled about 1,000 gallons of raw sewage into China Creek near the site of the old plant, Southworth said.
"We're not shaken by it at all," he said a few hours later, after the spill was cleaned. "We'd rather have these things happen now, while the contractor is still there, than a year from now." The new plant has a computer operating system, as Browning learned when he was able to start wastewater flowing into the new plant without any training, that Southworth said will not only lower the cost of providing an operations crew, but helps plant supervisors pinpoint problems quickly and accurately.
This is just one detail of the new plant that makes it unique in the Northwest, Southworth said.
Centralia hired CH2M Hill to design in several features that have never been used before in Washington, and a few extras to keep the neighbors happy, including noise and odor control.
Biosolids created at the plant will be lime-stabilized, which means at best the city will be able to sell the material as fertilizer to farmers, and at worst the city could simply apply the material to its own land surrounding the new plant.
Any of these options and those in between will save Centralia the thousands of dollars it pays now to have its unstabilized biosolids shipped to Eastern Washington, Southworth said.
Perhaps the best thing about the new plant, in Southworth's mind, is that it was designed with room to grow. The old plant was running at near capacity and had no room to grow, he said.
The new plant can treat 10 million gallons of wastewater per day with its current design, but there's room to expand that four times, Southworth said.
Reynolds, the project manager, explained that the system has the ability to serve 75,000 people in the long run.
"We've bought a future. We've planned for the long term," Southworth said.
After Centralia's mayor pushed the buttons that started the flow of wastewater into the new plant Thursday, Reynolds showed Browning and Chehalis Councilor Chad Taylor around the facility.
"It's no secret why Chad's here," Browning said a little later, expecting that the Chehalis official was interested not only in seeing how the plant worked, but in exploring again Chehalis' own options with regard to wastewater treatment.
The mayor learned then that adding more sewage to the process, say if Chehalis were to hook up to this new plant instead of building its own, would mean only a few upgrades would be needed.
It would also, however, mean constructing a miles-long pipe from Chehalis' old plant to Centralia's new pump station on Mellen Street.
The two cities talked about going in on one regional wastewater treatment plant several years ago, when both cities signed the Department of Ecology's consent decree calling for new treatment plants by 2008.
Talk died, however, not long after a 1999 joint engineering study estimated it would cost $25 million just to transport Chehalis' waste to northern Centralia, according to a story published in The Chronicle at about that time.
However, time is running out for Chehalis, which hasn't yet broken ground for a new plant. And current projections show that spending $42 million on a new plant could cost taxpayers anywhere from 50 to 150 percent more on their sewer bills over the next five years.
Chehalis city councilors have been reluctant to approve such increases.
They will meet again Thursday, in a workshop open to the public, to hear about the engineering history behind the city's current plans for a new treatment facility.
That meeting will take place at 5 p.m. in the Chehalis Community Services Activity Building.
Dian McClurg covers city government for Centralia and Chehalis, and health issues for The Chronicle. She may be reached at 807-8239, or by e-mail at dmcclurg@chronline.com.
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