Mount Olive sewer expansion planned
By Steve Herring
Published in News on July 14, 2014 1:46 PM
MOUNT OLIVE -- Increasing the size of a sewer force main will not only allow the town of Mount Olive to handle the additional demand from a planned expansion at the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. Distribution Center on Old Mount Olive Highway, but it will position the area near the town's industrial park for future growth as well, officials say.
The force main near the intersection of the Old Mount Olive Highway and Northeast Church Road has a capacity of 216,000 gallons per day.
"We can handle additional production at Mt. Olive Pickle with the capacity that we have now OK," Town Manager Charles Brown said. "But if we were to receive another request, and we frequently get inquiries at the industrial park or shell building that they need 'x number' of wastewater discharge per day, well, until we replace this force main we would have to say, 'We are sorry. We don't have the capacity at this point.'"
"The pumps and wet well handle substantially more than that, but it pumps into a four-inch force main that runs all the way down the Old Mount Olive Highway to Talton Avenue. That is the limiting factor."
A project is being designed that would increase the size of the force main to six inches to increase the station's capacity to a million gallons per day.
The main would run down Old Mount Olive Highway, that becomes North Center Street, to just south of Park Avenue, where it would be dropped into a gravity sewer line that runs to the wastewater treatment plant.
Brown thinks the town is 60 days or less away from submitting the design to the U.S. Department of Agriculture that the town has applied for a loan/grant from to build the project.
In addition to force main work, the town is also going to include two pieces of sewer equipment in the funding request. To clean the lines as required by law, the town is asking for a sewer line jettter that would carry a 1,100-gallon tank. The town also is asking for a camera system to allow it to video the sewer lines and pinpoint problems more cheaply.
"Right now what we have to do to find a problem is dig up the line until we find what the problem is," Brown said. "That is prohibitively expensive and it is time consuming."
Town officials were recently in LaGrange to look at two pieces of equipment that are basically identical to what the town needs for its sewer system. With a jetter, LaGrange was able to clean all but about two miles of its sewer lines in a year, Brown said.
"We have two projects we are working on funding right now," Brown said. "We have the Community Development Block grant that will do water and sewer on Williamson Street, water on Kelly Street, water on Fleer Street, and replace four lift stations -- Patten Street, Franklin Street, County Road and Cleveland Drive.
"The reason we went back on the USDA (force main) application we got into that, and we realized we only had two lift stations then, if we get the four done on the CDBG project, that haven't been replaced within the last four years."
The lift stations on Valley Road and Ridgecrest were added to the USDA force main funding request. That added about $500,000 to the project, Brown said.
It would upgrade the lift stations including new pumps, generators and telemetry.
"So when we finish every lift station in town will have been rehabbed or replaced," he said.
The lift stations, force main and equipment will cost about $1.2 million and would be funded by a USDA loan/grant.
Brown said he isn't sure how much funding the town will have to provide, but the engineer thinks it will 60 percent grant, 40 percent low-interest loan.
That would mean $500,000 from the town.
However, the town is asking for all of it as a grant, Brown said.
"You don't go in asking for half of something -- ask for the whole thing," he said. "Some of it will be grant money, but I think some of it will loan money."