By Jason Stuart
Ranger-Review Staff Writer
With an influx of capital from Bridger Pipeline on the horizon, the city of Glendive appears like it will soon be ready to move forward in earnest with a major renovation of the city’s water treatment plant.
“We are going to tell the council we are in a position to move forward with that water plant upgrade and modernization,” Mayor Jerry Jimison said on Thursday after learning of the proposed $680,000 contribution by Bridger to the water plant out of the fine levied against them by the Montana Department of Environmental Quality for the January 2015 Poplar Pipeline oil spill.
The city council also took an important first step on Tuesday night, authorizing the city to request qualifications from engineering firms to have them lined up and ready to submit Requests for Proposals (RFP) to the city for not only the water plant, but any and all city infrastructure projects. The 2017 Legislature passed a bill pushed for by Glendive officials which changed the RFP process in a manner which gives municipalities, rather than the engineering firms, more control and empowerment in the process.
Jimison said once the city has a list of qualified engineering firms interested in the water plant project “on the shelf,” then they’ll be ready to begin moving forward with the actual project.
In a best-case scenario, Jimison said he could envision the water plant renovation getting underway as early as next spring or summer.
“If we get the RFPs back and categorized by September-October, get an engineering firm on board by October-November, the ideal situation would be being able to go out for bids on the project by March,” he said. “I would think if we met that timeline and got the contractors hired by the spring of 2018, they could start work immediately.”
City Director of Operations Kevin Dorwart was a little more cautious, saying he is “not going to try to predict a timetable.” However, he too acknowledged that the city would be looking to move forward on the project as quickly as possible and that discussions about it should begin heating up soon.
“That process will take a little bit of time, but we’re going to try to expedite it as quickly as possible,” Dorwart said.
‘Quickly’ is the operative word in city officials’ desires to get the water plant renovation done. A Preliminary Engineering Report (PER) on the plant submitted two years ago showed that some of the plant’s primary systems could be on the verge of total, catastrophic collapse.
“We had a close enough scare there were it really exposed some deficiencies in our ability to deliver safe water to the community,” Jimison said.
The biggest concern at the water plant is that the walls of the Solids Contact Unit (SCU) appear to be on the verge of total breakdown. Engineers from Dowl, the firm which compiled the PER, noted in their report that the concrete walls of the SCU have deteriorated to the point that in some places, a screwdriver can be punched right through the wall.
The SCU, built in 1959, is what removes particulates, clarifies and softens the raw water pumped from the Yellowstone River. According to DOWL’s findings, the SCU is in “bad shape,” due to both its leaking, deteriorating concrete walls and the fact that new parts are increasingly unavailable for it given its age.
Besides the deterioration of the unit itself, Dowl noted in their PER that the plant has no redundancy in its system and therefore no means to bypass the SCU. That, Dowl engineers noted in their report to city officials, could prove disastrous for the city if the SCU does go down.
Safety concerns for the plant’s employees are another major issue detailed in the PER. The leaky SCU and other leaky pipes are, in places, spraying water on or near electrical control panels.
Most of the plant’s control systems are also “pretty dated and outlived their usefulness,” engineers noted in their report to the city. At present, the archaic controls prevent the plant’s much more modern pumps from achieving their full potential. Currently, the plant’s water treatment capacity is about 3.5 million gallons per day (gpd). With new controls and other renovations, that capacity could be doubled.
The estimated cost of renovating the water plant, which would include the construction of two brand-new SCUs, is in the $10-11 million dollar range according to Dowl’s PER, though those estimates are more than two years old.
Reach Jason Stuart at rrreporter@rangerreview.com.