Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
As Lauderdale grows, sewers teeter on brink
Downtown development rolls on despite decrepit network of pipes
Fort Lauderdale’s downtown sewer system was already straining two years ago, but the city kept approvals flowing for thousands of new condos, hotel rooms and stores.
A South Florida Sun Sentinel review of development and sewer records shows a system groaning under the city’s momentous growth. A utilities expert said the downtown sewer pump was working at its maximum two years ago and could not support more development. But since then, the city has approved 26 downtown projects with 6,368 residential units, plus 104 hotel rooms, 285,378 square feet of retail and 1 million square feet of office space, records show.
No downtown high-rise has been rejected because of the city’s deteriorating infrastructure. With a series of yes votes over the past five years, the city has ushered in the largest sustained period of development in the downtown’s history, records show. At just one meeting in
September, two weeks after commissioners approved a consent order imposed by the state Department of Environmental Protection because of major sewage spills citywide, commissioners unanimously approved three high-rises downtown with 1,115 residential units.
“I ABSOLUTELY hate what is happening to this town,” Fort Lauderdale native Jean Brady Drake emailed City Hall three weeks later, echoing a concern many residents are raising. “[I] don’t know what is happening to our infrastructure, and it is only going to get worse with all the building going on and planned. How can we handle all the new people?”
Adding in projects approved prior to October 2015, and those pending approval now, there are at least 11,416 condos or apartment units and 969 hotel rooms in review, approved or under construction downtown, according to city records.
Now the city is racing the clock to expand the downtown sewer capacity to accommodate development it already approved.
In an interview earlier this year, City Manager Lee Feldman said each high-rise adds a negligible amount of sewage and “has no real impact on the system.”
In a detailed response to questions, Fort Lauderdale public works and city administrative officials on Thursday expressed confidence the downtown sewer system can sustain the growth, a confidence contingent on a host of public works projects that have yet to be completed.
“Hydraulic modeling indicates, even with projected growth, that these system improvements will fully support the wastewater needs of the City,” officials said in their emailed response.
Among the challenges the city faces:
The city’s pipe network is so decrepit that at least half of the fluid inside the pipes — 50 to 60 percent — is rain or groundwater has that seeped in from outside, a hulking problem expected to worsen with tidal flooding and sea level rise, according to the city’s recently adopted utilities master plan by consultant Reiss Engineering. Though no system is completely sealed, the amount seeping into Fort Lauderdale’s pipes is far outside the norm and is considered excessive by the federal Environmental Pro-
tection Agency’s standards. Sand also gets inside, wreaking havoc on pipes and parts, said Raph Zeltman, a former utilities worker and member of the city’s infrastructure task force. “It’s like a sand grinder in there,” he told the Sun Sentinel.
The downtown sewer pumping station was operating “at the station’s maximum capacity levels” when Reiss Engineering reviewed that part of the system two years ago. “Any current and future growth will exceed the existing station’s capacity,” the report warned. The conclusion was based on development in October 2015, the report says. The city has known of that conclusion since at least this February, when the city accepted that section of the report, it says.
The age of the pipes downtown and at the central beach is unknown. The city said it has no records for the pipes in those areas. In addition, pipes downtown were largely made of vitrified clay pipe, which is brittle and cracks when its wooden supports fall apart.
While the city is expected to have sufficient water supply far into the future, that’s not the case for wastewater treatment. The capacity at the city’s George T. Lohmeyer Wastewater Treatment Plant is forecast to be exceeded by 2035.
City officials said they’re addressing the potential problems and are committed to spending more than $8 million to reduce flows in the downtown pipes and alleviate possible backing up of sewage. The city plans to lay a new sewer main under Las Olas Boulevard that officials said “will divert additional flows away from the downtown area.”
Two months ago, city commissioners awarded a contract for a second sewage pumping station to serve “the downtown development area.” A city memo said the existing station “is currently at capacity” and the new one would “allow for future development.”
The new pump station will handle 1 million gallons of sewage a day, city memos said. The housing towers alone would add 2.7 million gallons of sewage a day, according to estimates in the city’s utilities master plan of 241 gallons a day per condo unit.
Even when the new pump station is built, records show, the downtown sewage will back up in pipes during the days with the heaviest flows, the consultant warned. That can lead to sewer manholes overflowing into the streets, as happened earlier this year during the heavy rains of hurricane season.
The city, in its response, said the pump station “is only one part of the system to manage capacity concerns in the downtown area.” City officials said the city has an “aggressive” program to deal with the top problem — the seepage of outside water into the pipes. By sealing pipes, they said, they’ll free up space for sewage and alleviate the potential for sewage to back up.
The same strategy will be applied citywide to reduce sewage flows to the treatment plant, to avoid running over capacity there, officials said.
The clay pipes downtown will be lined instead of replaced, city officials said, giving them “another 15-20 years of life … at a fraction of the cost to replace” them.
The consultant endorsed the city’s plan for the downtown but couldn’t rule out future troubles. The report suggested that the city lay larger pipes if problems persist.
The city has $69 million in water-sewer work under way now and plans to borrow $200 million in January to complete the most urgent projects.
Though the needs are far greater at an estimated $1.4 billion over 20 years, Feldman said it’s not practical to rip up streets all over town or take too many pipes out of use at once.
Much of the initial work is dictated by the state Department of Environmental Protection. Because the city spilled 20.6 million gallons of untreated sewage into local waterways since January 2014, the state DEP negotiated a court-enforceable consent order against the city, with deadlines to complete urgent repairs.
Ed Kwoka, a businessman who sits on the city’s new infrastructure task force, is among those worrying aloud about whether the city can keep up with the system’s deterioration. The cost to modernize the system is larger when pipes get to the point of bursting, he said.
The city expects to spend $13.7 million trucking sewage from one manhole to another, for example, while repairing a 30-inch sewer main that burst in the Tarpon River neighborhood a year ago. The repair itself is only slightly more, at $14.5 million.
“If the city doesn’t start making some changes, $1.4 billion in a crisis is going to become $3 billion,” Kwoka said at a recent task force meeting, “and at what point don’t the toilets flush? … When my granddaughter, who I’m expecting any day now, is born, is she going to stand at the side of the canal and say, ‘Oh, that’s nice,’ or am I living on a sewer?”