Alliance manager gives update on sewer repairs

During a recent city council meeting, Alliance Manager Dan Scherer reviewed a power point presentation to update council members on the city’s sewer repairs. His presentation covered a six-year plan of specific projects, but he asked the council to, “Please note that these have been prioritized, but priority can change at any given time based on something else occurring in that line.”

Many of the projects include as many as seven properties all connecting to single 4-inch or 6-inch mains and causing backups, or crumbling Orangeburg piping. Other issues include limited or no access and poorly routed piping.

Scherer went on to discuss the ongoing repairs on Clay, Alma and Sycamore streets. The bid was awarded for the project in January and work began in March, with a projected completion date of mid-July. All clearing and grubbing has been completed and the center line of the sewer path has been staked. So far, 907 feet of 8” main piping and four manholes have been installed. Seven services were connected.

Year one includes easy Highland and the Klumpp subdivision. While the subdivision has been completed, East Highland was referred to engineers Allgeier Martin due to the location of the sewer line and easement having garages, outbuildings and fences over the center line of the sewer making excavation impossible.

Year two included North Cedar and North Ash. On North Cedar they were initially unable to clean lines due to no access point. A manhole was installed by the city staff to allow cleaning and inspection. Alliance staff inspected the lines to find them full of silt and solids. Once cleaned, the lines were found to be in good condition with no repairs needed. A portion of 8-inch main was crushed and once that was replaced by city staff the project was complete.

The remainder of the presentation covered tentative projects to take place over the next four years, including the installation of 8-inch PVC sewer line, manholes for access and maintenance, replacement of Orangeburg pipe, and the connection of services. Several include issues of a number of properties attached to a single 4-inch or 6-inch line.

City Manager JD Kehrman pointed out that those projects falling under “on the radar” are problems that are known but not yet causing issues – like a manhole in a garage. “We know these need to be fixed, but they aren’t creating any kind of a compliance issue.”

The owner supervised projects are issues the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) has “maybe had something to say about them or we know that DNR is going to have something to say about them. We attack those relatively quickly – then at the top is everything we are going after right now,” Kehrman continued. “I think the key to remember about this configuration is that anything on that list can suddenly rocket to the top if it becomes serious enough.”

Scherer added that properties are added to the radar list almost monthly. “A lot of 4-inch lines with multiple connections really need to be corrected in order to eliminate backup problems.”

In a separate interview, Kehrman explained the interconnected service lines as one of the biggest problems with Nevada’s collection system. “Essentially what we have in town are all these interconnected service lines and they almost all function like mains in the sense that you’ll have one, and then everybody else will be connected to that person’s service line. The result is often sewage backup and slow drainage. In many cases we have to build a main, or an extension of the system. In those cases we have to get DNR blessing. Those particular cases are the ones that fall into that owner supervised plan.”

Kehrman identified the second biggest issue with the sewer system as the inflow infiltration. “That’s when the rainwater gets into the collection system. When all that excess water gets into the system, we have to treat all that storm water. Any rainwater that gets into the system is infiltration. Increasingly, the state is telling us that we have to have a correction plan that we can show them.”

The city manager says the most important takeaway is that residents know the improvements in the collection system are going to be ongoing. “This is going to be years of getting caught up and finding these problems and modernizing. We just don’t have the money to do it all at once so we have to prioritize and allocate money each year to the projects.”