Upgrades to town sewer lines advance
By Steve Herring
Published in News on December 3, 2014 1:46 PM
MOUNT OLIVE -- Mount Olive town commissioners Monday night unanimously approved a resolution to accept a $1.124 million federal grant/loan to improve the town sewer system.
The town would use the money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to increase the size of a force main near the intersection of Northeast Church Road and Old Mount Olive Highway. It would also be used to replace lift stations on Valley Road and Ridgecrest and to purchase a mobile sewer line jetter and sewer line camera.
The lift stations would be upgraded to include new pumps, generators and telemetry.
The town will be required to provide a 10 percent match of approximately $112,000 on the project that has been nearly a year in the making.
The $1.124 million breaks down to a 40-year $512,000 loan and a $489,700 grant. The remainder will be the town's 10 percent match.
After approving the resolution the board took a 10-minute break in order for Mayor Ray McDonald Sr. and Town Clerk Arlene Talton to sign the necessary paperwork so that USDA representative Eric Gaskins could take it to Raleigh today.
Increasing the force main capacity will allow the town to meet an increase in demand when the Mt. Olive Pickle Co. expands its distribution center on the Old Mount Olive Highway.
It also will provide for future growth at the nearby Mount Olive Industrial Park.
That additional flow is expected to bring the sewer lift station at the corner of the Old Mount Olive Highway and Northeast Church Road up to its design capacity of 216,000 gallons per day.
However, the limiting factor on the capacity is not the station itself, but the force main that would be increased in size to six inches in order to increase that station's capacity to a million gallons per day.
The main would run down the Old Mount Olive Highway, that becomes North Center Street, to Tillman Street, where it would be dropped into a gravity sewer line that runs to the wastewater treatment plant.
The town is required by law to inspect and clean 10 percent of its sewer lines annually. The town has just over 30 miles of sewer lines meaning that slightly more than three miles of line have to be cleaned annually.
The state inspected the system in June.
The town received a good report, but still fell short of the 10 percent goal -- 6 percent was cleaned using what in essence is a glorified pressure washer and a tank on the back of a truck.
The town wants to buy a trailer-mounted sewer line jetter, with an 1,100-gallon tank that will allow it to clean the lines.
The town also is asking for a camera system to allow it to video the sewer lines and pinpoint problems. Currently, in order to locate a problem, the town has dig up the line until it is found. That is prohibitively expensive and it is time consuming, town officials said.