Although the road to restoring the City of Greenville’s Wastewater Treatment Plant to fully functioning operations has been a long one, albeit in the wake of a pandemic, progress has been significant.
During their Wednesday meeting, the public works committee had a discussion regarding a sludge disposal change order as recommended by engineer Darrell Martinek of W.L. Burle, Engineers, PA.
Martinek informed the committee that the contractor had begun hauling off materials and after talking with the state auditor’s office, estimated they may actually under-run some quantities.
In essence, it means all of the materials and the cost of those materials may not be exhausted as estimated in the contract for the Lagoon No. 2 cleaning project.
There are three lagoons total.
If they indeed under-run the quantities, the change order would allow the contractors to turn their trackhoe 180 degrees to start cleaning out Lagoon No. 1, according to Martinek.
“What I’m wanting is to allow them to clean out Lagoon No. 1 until we hit the contract amount of $2,259,000,” he said.
Martinek also noted the Levee Board requires the contractors to only go so deep — staying above the asphalt structure — and believes the likelihood of some sludge remaining in the lagoon is great.
“When we did the facilities plan for State Revolving Fund (SRF) Loan 10, the Department of Environmental Quality broke that up on their own volition for Loans 10 and 11, but in Contract. No. 11 was a project to clean out Lagoon No. 1,” Martinek explained. “When they wrote the loan, they didn’t include the language to allow that to happen and that’s why we got the rejection letter on Contract No. 10., but they are willing to do a change order in SRF 10 which is what this contract is.”
With the prospect of funds remaining from the current contract, Martinek made his recommendation for full council consideration to let the contractors begin cleaning out a portion of Lagoon No. 1 until the dollar amount of the contract is reached.
The committee voted unanimously to approve the recommendation for consideration by the city council.
The administrative order the city is currently under with the EPA requires the plant to be operational enough for an average water flow of roughly 8 million gallons a day, though the order permits 20 million gallons.
According to Burle, the plant has to be up and running with flows around 8 million gallons per day to be in compliance.
Once the plant reaches that point, it will have to demonstrate six months of successful flows and then it will be on track for full operation.
The public works committee also discussed website management services needed to comply with the consent decree and the administrative order.
Martinek pointed out the city has not had anyone managing the site since March and in order to stay compliant, the submitted plans, reports, lab results and so forth has to be posted on the city’s website periodically.
With that, a consensus was reached among the committee to make sure they worked to that end.
