Scott Swanson
Greg Springman holds a 4-inch water main that’s, well, in rough shape.
Rust pocks the inside, in large deposits in places. Any coating on the surface is long gone.
He picks up a 2-inch pipe, the kind that delivers drinking water to residences. It’s even worse.
“This year we have a lot of water projects,” said Springman, the city’s Public Works director. “Just off the top of our head, we have identified five miles of small-diameter water mains that need replacement. Some of these pipes are more than 80 years old.”
That’s just the tip of the iceberg for the repairs and upgrades he and his staff have in mind.
The city budgeted $200,000 last year for the work, which, Springman said, will likely extend into next year or two.
“The idea is that, based on funding availability, we’re going to start knocking off small bits of these five miles as we can. What that entails is new mains, new services up to the customers, and an (asphalt) overlay of their streets when it’s done,” he said. “So when we’re out of there, everything is complete.”
The Public Works Department also plans to make repairs and upgrades to the city’s water treatment plant: adding an emergency generator, a backwash pump to help with cleaning the system, changing the filtration media, adding a fluoride system, installing new water meters at most residences and, overarching it all, producing a new water master plan.
Springman, who came to Sweet Home in 2017 with some 30 years of experience in water and wastewater treatment in Southern California, and city Utilities Manager Steve Haney, said the city’s water system has been subject to “pressure issues,” as Springman put it.
“We knew we had fluctuations and we knew we had leaks,” he said. “So what we’re trying to do as a team – this kind of looks horrible, but we’re trying to get the system stable and then, once we get it stable, we know we have capacity issues. We’ve got projects down the road that we know we’re going to have to build another reservoir for, especially as development occurs.”
He said the city has located “tons of leaks” over the past three years.
Since mid-2018, the city has plugged well over 150 water pipe leaks that accounted for the loss of about half of the water it produced. One on 9th Avenue, discovered in early 2020, was wasting nearly 350,000 gallons per day.
“It’ll help the distribution system,” Haney said of the fixes. “We shouldn’t have as low pressures.”
All the system’s parts must synchronize to make the system stable, so the staff’s working on finding ways to get everything working in sync.
“So the treatment plant is a great treatment plant,” Springman said. “I think, when it was built, there was no consideration of how it operationally reacts with the system and how staff would run it. So you have this really great plant that can operate, but they didn’t take into consideration XYZ, whatever that is, and how it affects the system.”
“Most water treatment plants pump directly into a reservoir and then that reservoir feeds the distribution network,” said City Engineering Tech Trish Rice, who will become the project manager for the wastewater plant when it comes online. “Ours doesn’t do that. Ours pumps directly into the pipes. The reservoirs are on the far edges of that.”
“And everybody taps into that before it gets to the reservoir,” Springman added. “So you’ve got all these people pulling off that. It’s not a direct line to a reservoir.”
That’s why the goal is to “stabilize it,” he said, adding that when he arrived in Sweet Home, he saw “swings” and heard complaints from customers about fluctuations in water pressure.
New Water Master Plan
Springman said the city’s been concentrating on its wastewater issues, and “we hadn’t really looked at the water side as much.”
The city is currently designing a new water system for 9th Avenue, from Cedar Street to Oak Terrace, and 8th Avenue, from Alder to Cedar streets, and Alder Street, from 8th to 9th, Rice said.
The city has an existing plan, but, according to Springman, it’s “outdated.”
“I don’t feel like it adequately captures the condition of our existing system and what needs to be done to improve service,” Rice said.
“The water master plan is kind of like your bible on how your development goes,” Springman said. “What pipe should go where, reservoir capacities. It looks at a range of different operational things.
“It lays the foundation for what we should be doing, looking forward.”
He said the master plan focuses on “putting the foundation right down on the small-diameter (pipes, which deliver the water from mains to the customers’ homes).
“We’re gonna start fixing the sticks in the pipes and we’re going to get our energy right at the water plant so we’re more resilient.”
He said the city has already replaced its stream monitors, which, according to Haney, read the electrical charge on the water and then adjust the levels of chemicals used to treat water, particularly aluminum chlorohydrate, a chemical used to filter water and reduce its corrosion.
“It helps control how well the plant works when there’s nobody there, so it’s able to run a little more automated,” Haney said.
Also, the city is replacing the media – essentially various types of sand – used to filter drinking water, for the first time since the plant went online on Aug. 13, 2009.
“We want to have a system that runs uninterrupted and has high-quality water,” Springman said.
He added that the switch last year from Jacobs Engineering operating the system to city staffers handling the operations has been beneficial.
“We’re in a great place now,” he said. “We’ve been doing this for almost a year, taking it back in.”
Emergency Generator
The new master plan includes scoping – an assessment of the water treatment plant completed 13 years ago, and the addition of an emergency generator.
Springman said that during the Labor Day fires of 2020, it became obvious that the water plant would not be able to operate during a power outage, which means it couldn’t produce water when it may have been particularly needed.
“One thing we learned when we had the fires recently is that we’re vulnerable,” he said. “We were in Evacuation Level 1 for some time. In that fire, if winds had picked up or put us in a different situation – if the fire had come into our community, then typically, if we had lost power, we wouldn’t have been able to make water after two or three days, and we only have limited storage.”
He said the installation of a generator to power the plant will change that.
Fluoridation
The City Council last year approved a new fluoride system and Springman said staff has discussed the cost and what will be involved in getting it installed. Components are being ordered, but Haney said the project will probably be completed in the next fiscal year.
The Oregon Health Authority recommends a fluoridation level of 0.7, and though small amounts of fluoride naturally occur in the water, Springman said it requires treatment to get to that point.
Backwash Pumping
According to Springman, the city plans to install backwash pumps that will enable it to keep producing water while filters are being cleaned.
Haney said the pumps will enable water plant operators to avoid turning pumps on and off, but will allow them to run the pumps at variable speeds as needed to keep the system operating smoothly.
Also, he said, the pumps will allow the city to channel water in ways that will allow it to detect leaks and to clean filters while continuing to produce drinking water. He said the pumps should help avoid low pressures in the system as well.
Water Meter Replacement
The Finance Department actually instigated the replacement of water meters, although Public Works installs them, Springman said. Sweet Home has some 3,500 water accounts and Springman said the city budgeted some $650,000 last year to replace all of them as they go bad.
Water meters fail at the rate of eight to 13 a month, and Public Works has thus far replaced about 30 percent of the total meters.
Springman said the new meters are made of “inexpensive materials, versus heavy brass,” and they have no moving parts so corrosion is less of a problem.
The new meters can also sense lower flows, which is a tip-off of the presence of a leak.
“The old meters wouldn’t pick that up,” Springman said. “We’ll pick it up.”
Water Modeling
Rice has completed a water model of Sweet Home’s system, Springman said, for the first in Sweet Home’s history.
Rice described it as “a digital representation of our system” that will provide computer-generated information on the number and locations of pumps, the capacities of pipes and their locations, and hydraulic calculations and flow rate estimates at requested locations.
“You can put in your water meter consumption and see pressures across the system,” she said, adding that the program will also give water age and quality readings.
“As water gets older, it loses its chlorine budget and it might change in taste a little bit.”
Those can be calculated in the computer, which allows for the planning and verification of the model’s accuracy. Springman likened it to weather models used on TV news shows.
“They plug in all this information and it continues what’s going to happen in the forecast. We now have that here,” he said.
He and Rice said the model helps staff determine which water lines need to be flushed or replaced, and how large a replacement pipe should be to serve its purpose.
“Where we went from five years ago to now, and where we’re heading holistically in looking at our system is day and night to what it was before,” Springman said. “We only hope that, by us doing this and moving forwards, that we’re creating a foundation and an environment that, as long as we’re here, we keep these plants together and the people who are going to come in behind us will do the same things.
“Our hope is to get the system where it needs to be and plan for our future development because, Sweet Home’s going to blow up, sooner or later.”