The City of Benton is making progress on its long-running sewer renovation and cleanup project.
Mayor Rita Dotson said sanitation crews were working to clean out sewer lines throughout a portion of the city as part of its ongoing effort to meet the requirements of an agreed order with the Kentucky Department for Environmental Protection Division of Water. Dotson said some years ago extensive rainfall led to a sewage overflow, resulting in action from the Division of Water.
“We had to develop a five-year plan, and in that five-year plan they’re lifting up the manholes to make them more accessible, and I guess the overflow is not as bad,” Dotson said. “… So we’re raising up all the manholes. They’re going all over town and doing smoke testing and that type thing to see where our biggest … problems are. Even, like, lateral lines going up to houses, a lot of times they’ll have holes, or their cleanout line might not have a cap on it. Their gutters might be attached to our system and you’ve got all that rainwater running in. So, we’re trying to find problems and take care of them.”
According to the corrective action plan issued in 2015, the city should implement a number of improvements by 2021, including a complete sewer rehabilitation, smoke testing, sludge elimination and improvements and lift station elimination at locations throughout the city. The city must report to the state every three months on progress made on the project.
“We borrowed, through Kentucky Infrastructure, we borrowed $1,780,000, and I have to go to Frankfort May 4 to get the confirmation for that loan,” Dotson said. “So, it should all be taken care of that day.”
The city is also expected to develop and implement a Capacity, Management, Operations and Maintenance (CMOM) program, which includes cleaning out the city’s sewer lines.
It’s an issue not unique to Benton. Harold Helton, Benton wastewater plant manager, said aging infrastructure coupled with expensive renovations meant the project was slow going, despite a five-year plan. Helton said no target completion date had been set.
“Right now we’ve been working on Olive Street, Main, Poplar, Elm and Birch,” Helton said.
Crews have been working to lift manholes throughout the city and focusing clearing lines from about 20 percent of the system – equal to roughly four miles of sewer line Helton said. It, too, was not particularly quick work, Helton said, as the process from the time an engineer drafts plans to completion on the designated area could take about six months.
“The scope of work usually takes around, from start to finish from the engineer’s standpoint of coming in here and doing a sanitary sewer survey to find out what areas need work, that takes a good three months,” Helton said. “And then we have to do smoke testing, flow monitoring during, like on a dry day versus a rainy day we’ll look at what’s flowing through the pipes and measure what’s flowing through the pipes on a dry day with no rain – say a week if we didn’t get any rain – we’ll have flow meters in the line, and they’ll tell how many gallons flow through that pipeline in a 24-hour time period. We’ll go back and check it again during a rain event, and measure the flow through pipeline during a rain event. Because that’s the whole purpose of the work is to stop I & I, which is inflow and infiltration, as rainwater’s getting in our sewer system.”
Helton said there were things the average citizen could do to cut down on work time and cost, though. Because conditions in the pipeline won’t allow some materials to break down, residents should avoid flushing items that don’t break down easily, such as paper towels, feminine hygiene products and diapers.
“They wreak havoc on our system,” Helton said. “They get in our pumps, and they cause our pumps to burn the motors up in them because they get wrapped around the impellers; they’ll burn the seals out of pumps and then it’ll eventually burn the motor up. And grease – if people would just put their feminine products in the trash can … anything like that, we put it in the trash can. That would help a lot. When you’re spending $7,000 on a pump, and you’ve got 34 of them, it adds up.”
Maintaining clean-out caps to prevent excess mulch or excess rainwater from running into the sewer system is important too, Helton said. Residents should also avoid purposely uncapping the line to allow yard drainage of rainwater. While Helton said those things seemed innocuous, it increased costs to the city and thus taxpayers.
“If for every gallon of rainwater that gets in your system – say, our plant does around 400,000 gallons a day in raw sewage, and when it rains we’ll do 2 million,” Helton said. “That’s four times as much. But if you’ve got a half a million gallons of sewage and then a million and half gallons of rainwater, well the Division of Water looks at it as you’re going to have to treat 2 million gallons of sewage, because once it mixes with sewage it becomes sewage. That costs taxpayers on the chemicals you have to use to treat all that, and those chemicals are very high, very expensive.”