Engineer: Sewer investment is paying off
Some future projects in FD will be unnecessary
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About 20 years ago, every heavy rain produced all kinds of problems in Fort Dodge.
Sanitary sewers overloaded with rain backed up into homes, ruining basements and costing homeowners thousands of dollars in damage.
In an effort to help solve that problem, the city deployed 13 trailer mounted pumps to remove water from manholes during storms. But that created another problem – raw sewage on the streets,
In 2011, the City Council approved a plan to deal with these problems. It also increased the monthly utility bills by adding a community sewer initiative fee.
The effort to tackle those sewer problems is working, the City Council learned Monday.
Derick Anderson, market leader of McClure Engineering Co. in Fort Dodge, reported that sewer backups and the need for the trailer-mounted pumps have been eliminated.
"The story needs to be told that the work we did and the money we spent benefitted the community," Councilman Terry Moehnke said.
According to Anderson, the initial plan envisioned spending about $79 million to solve the sewer problems.
Over the past 15 years, $54.7 million has been spent, he said.
The projects paid for with that $54.7 million have apparently worked so well that some other, expensive projects won't be necessary.
Anderson said his company did some flow monitoring to check on the effectiveness of what has been done so far. He said that data revealed that an additional $15.2 million worth of work on South 22nd Street, Elmhurst Avenue, Exposition Drive, 10th Avenue North and 16th Avenue North won't be necessary.
He is now recommending that the city do a series of sampler projects intended to address what engineers call inflow and infiltration. Inflow and infiltration occurs with water that should be in storm sewers instead gets into sanitary sewers. That has the potential for overloading the sanitary sewer system.
Chad Schaeffer, the city’s chief development officer, said that since the $15.2 million worth of work is no longer necessary, the effort to stop inflow and infiltration can be done without raising utility bills.
The initial proposal from Anderson calls for spending $1.5 million to do the initial flow monitoring and repairs to address inflow and infiltration.