Work to repair an issue at an older water plant in Bremen may come with a high price tag.
Bremen Water Superintendent Alex Mikel told the Bremen Town Council members Monday night that a filter from 1965 failed at a water plant.
“The bottom fell out,” he stated. “The media that’s supposed to be on top of a false floor that separates the clear well and the media – somehow it got a hole in it somewhere. So, that filter is offline and reducing our pumping capacity 720,000 gallons a day.”
Mikel said he looked to Ken Jones from JPR to help assess the situation to see if the filter is needed.
Jones explained that they started the assessment by reviewing the town’s elevated storage to see how much water capacity there is without pumping water.
Jones commented, “They way we analyze how much storage the town needs is we look at your max day demand and then the peak during any given pumping period, take that difference plus what it takes to fight a fire at 2,000 gallons a minute for two hours. We’re finding that you’re about a half million gallons short of what you should have in elevated storage which means one of the two towers, actually the oldest one, would need to go from 300,000 gallons up to 900,000 gallons. We would not recommend that you leave that filter off.”
He stressed that the ability to deliver water to the system and the diminished elevated storage capacity warrants repair to the filter.
The new plant can help offset the issue, but there is not enough capacity.
Mikel hopes that repair work can be done to address the issue.
“Just the media itself and the work to put that in without any repairs is like $50,000 just for media, stone, gravel and all of that stuff and half of the filter. At any time, the rest of the filter could have potential issues. We’re taking a gamble here trying to get this back online by making small repairs.”
Jones said the floor may need to be replaced which will be a tricky task as the entrance into the area is terribly small. He warned that if the floor needs to be replaced it may cost around $125,000.
Crews from the water department will do what can be done with Peerless Midwest assisting with the project.
Even though the water plant is suffering this temporary issue, Jones stated that the water plant is generally in very good condition, especially with parts dating back 50 years.
