Wastewater treatment plant nears completion
Turning the switch to activate the new wastewater treatment plant is about six weeks away, if all goes as planned.
The plant will be operational by mid-September, according to Water Utilities superintendent Ken Hayes. The 18-month project was delayed slightly by continuous rain this spring, but should be online soon, Hayes said.
“It’s been a long process, but we’re getting there,” he said.
The plant is a simultaneous nitrification denitrification activated sludge plant and should handle a million gallons a day.
“The simultaneous nitrification denitrification makes the plant quite a bit more complicated because of getting nitrogen out,” Hayes said.
The current plant, constructed in the 1980s, is essentially the first plant for the city, Hayes said. “Before that, there were two sewer ponds.”
According to newspaper records, the Arkansas Department of Pollution Control and Ecology granted a permit to Pea Ridge for construction of a new sewer plant in July 1979. City ordinance 130 authorized improvements and repairs to the current treatment plant; it was approved in 1984.
Former city employee Ron David (who worked for the city from 1980 to 1994) said there was a double lagoon system before the plant was built in the early 1980s.
“The old plant got us 30 years,” Hayes said. It’s capacity is 300,000 gallons a day max and
“This will be a high tech plant with sensors.”
Ken Hayes
Superintendent
Pea Ridge Water Utilities Dept.
it’s currently pumping 370,000 gallons a day. The new plant will have a capacity of a million gallons a day.
The new plant was originally estimated to cost over $8 million, but the final cost, Hayes said, will be $7,970,000 and will include a $7,000 per month savings thanks to low interest rates.
The city’s Water Utilities Department serves more than 3,000 customers with the latest numbers of 3,119 water customers and 2,308 wastewater customers, according to records at the Water Utilities Department. There were 1,882 sewer customers in December 2016, and 2,132 in December 2018.
In June of 2018, city officials were notified that the plans for the new plant were in Little Rock awaiting approval from the Arkansas Health Department and the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.
Bids were approved during a special meeting Dec. 4, 2018.
Ground was broken in March 2019.
“It took three years to get it engineered,” Hayes said, “way longer than they typically take.”
The new plant includes a half million dollars worth of electrical work, Hayes said, explaining that the bulk of the work is being done now.
“It’s a ‘racetrack’ with the wastewater going from the first cell to the second cell then to the clarifier,” Hayes said, explaining that the clarifier removes sludge — either waste activated sludge or return activated sludge, some of which is returned to the wastewater to keep the bug activity going.
“What’s wasted will go into the two ponds on the right, that’s basically sludge storage. The other side will be rainwater redundancy,” he said. “It’ll automatically bypass the plant.”
“Because Pea Ridge is so flat — then, you’ve got all your outlying areas,” Hayes said of the water runoff from rain. “When the drainage gets so bad, it’s just going in the manholes so we get hammered.
“On a rain that’s not so bad, it doesn’t do much, but on a big rain, it’ll come in here for three days. It’s just geography.”
In the clarifier, all the “heavy stuff falls down,” he said. Basically, as it’s “stirred” with an arm like a squeegee, the bottom and the top layers are separated and removed.
“Once it comes to the clarifiers, then it’s sent to different locations for filtering and disinfecting… there’s a lot to it,” he said.
“This will be a high tech plant with sensors; it’ll save money as well,” Hayes said.
Current employee Jake Wagner has been training and has earned his wastewater 3 license.
“We’re kind of lucky because Jake is pretty good at it,” Hayes said. He said Wagner has been training at the Rogers plant as it’s fairly similar to the Pea Ridge plant.
“We’ve needed this for years,” Hayes said. “It was way over due.”