Lakeside Plant marks 70 years
With plans for a new water-treatment plant being discussed, city officials have said the fate of the Lakeside Plant is uncertain, but in the interim the 70-year-old facility at 300 Pineland Drive remains indispensable.
It proves its worth during times of peak demand, or when the larger Ouachita Plant on upper Lake Hamilton isn’t operating at its full 20-million-gallon-a-day capacity.
Located on the site of the city’s original waterworks, Lakeside feeds the 2.8 million-gallon-storage tank on Holly Street. A pump station pushes water from Holly Street more than 100-feet
uphill to the 300,000-gallon tank near the Hills at Belvedere.
The plant serves the north side of the water system and was integral in extinguishing the Majestic Hotel blaze in February
2014, supplying the tanks the Hot Springs Fire Department drafted from to bring the fire to heel. But a new pump station the city has added on Pine Street diminishes the plant’s usefulness, allowing the Holly Street tank to be fed from the Ouachita Plant by way of the
3-million-gallon twin tanks on Cooper Lane.
The pump station connects the Cooper Lane tanks and the
250,000-gallon tank on Woodmere Road to Holly Street. Water from the Ouachita Plant in Mountain Pine gets pumped to the 3 million-gallon tank on Music Mountain Road. It’s then pumped more than 150 feet uphill to Cooper Lane and Woodmere Road. .
“Pine Street makes it to where we can feed the entire system from (the Ouachita Plant),” said Monty Ledbetter, the city’s director of utilities. “I’m not sure what the future holds for Lakeside.”
The Arkansas Department of Health’s 2016 Sanitary Survey of the water system lists Lakeside’s capacity at 6 mgd, but Ledbetter said 3 to 4 mgd is its limit. That output is critical during peak demand or when repairs limit the Ouachita Plant’s capacity.
Lakeside operated at full capacity earlier this month when the 24-inch transmission line from the Ouachita Plant was valved off for repairs. With only the 30-inch line distributing water from the facility, flow rate was increased to offset the curtailed distribution.
Mineral deposits on the interior of the line were collected by the increased throughput, leading to discolored water that had to be flushed from the system. The resulting production loss required Lakeside to fill the breach.
“During the dingy water period, we ran Lakeside as hard as we could,” Deputy City Manager Bill Burrough said. “We pushed as much water through it as we could.”
Lakeside also operates at peak capacity during the summer months, when demand is at its highest, Burrough said.
“For three or four weeks, she gives all she’s got to feed the sprinklers,” he said.
A significant capital investment is needed to keep Lakeside operating after the 15-to-20 mgd plant the city plans to build comes online. It will treat the 23 mgd of Lake Ouachita storage the city purchased earlier this month from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
The Department of Health survey said the liner on one of the wells that holds finished water has a leak, and that some of Lakeside’s filters need upgrades.
“It has a useful life and is a valuable water source, but for us to keep it online in the future it’s going to require some work,” Burrough said.
Lake Ricks, the plant’s raw-water source, is also an issue. Fed by rain runoff, the reservoir cannot be tapped during a drought.
“There’s no firm yield,” Burrough said. “During periods of drought, it can’t produce any water. You can’t depend on it.”
The removal of the 5-foot spillway wall has lowered the water level, creating further risk of the water line dropping below the plant’s intake. Consultants from O’Brien & Gere Engineers advised the city to remove the wall last year, explaining that water lapping against it had created seepage problems.
The spillway empties into a tributary of Bull Bayou, and the consultants said a dam failure would flood homes downstream.
“Ricks wasn’t designed for that 5-foot extension, so we went back to its original earthen-dam design,” Burrough said.