Force main almost complete, despite roadblocks
The new ten inch pipes are lines across the ground to replace the old eight inch pipes.
Danielle Switalski
The new pipes for the force main, used for pumping the town’s sewage, which run along the North side of Central are almost in place even though it is running a little behind schedule.
The town received $502,000 for the replacement of the eight-inch pipe currently running the town’s waste into the lagoons with a new ten-inch pipe. The reason the town went looking for money for the project, said Plains mayor Michael Brinson, was because leaks in the eight-inch pipe kept ocurring. The town received funding from the State Revolving Fund. 55% of this money is stimulus and 45% of it the town is borrowing at a low interest rate of three-quarters of a percent.
“The benefit to the town is that it will allow the town to grow more homes, more bathrooms and that kind of stuff for the future so that if we can get rid of the waste out of town and get it pumped into the lagoons,” said Brinson.
The force main which began undergoing construction at the end of the summer was set for completion October 28, however, the construction crew has met a few setbacks moving the deadline up to November 9. One problem was that the construction crew hit the eight-inch pipe currently in use three different times, which caused the sewage to leak out onto the open ground. Brinson said the town would have to send someone to turn off the sewage pumps in order to repair the breaks, which can be a very timely process because the sewage pumps can only be turned off for four hours at a time otherwise the sewage could back up and turn into an even bigger mess.
Phone lines located directly next to the ditch also added to the slow process of the placement of the new pipes. Workers accidentally broke the phone line three or four times in the two months of construction. This completely halts construction as the workers then have to wait for someone to come out and repair it.
“Everyone thinks they are not going to make a mistake, but it happens,” said Brinson.
Despite these set backs Brinson is confident the force main will be finished on or close to the new deadline date of November 9 as construction crews are no longer fighting with the phone lines at their current location on Central and are laying down more feet of pipe everyday.
“It’s nothing the town is going to see, or notice anything different on their sewer bills, the sewage doesn’t run away any faster than what it normally did, it just lets us grow now for 20 or 25 years without having to worry about upgrading anything else,” said Brinson.