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There are a lot of great things that you see above the ground in the City, and you can
admire them and just be amazed at how did they build that?
Yet, with the water and sewer utility, everything is under the ground.
One of the things that the EPA requires us to do is to do a better job of managing the
Utility and doing the maintenance work that's required.
The EPA was charged with responsibility to enforce the Clean Water Act. And two requirements
that they had related to the pipes we have in the ground is to: Clean them on a regular
basis,and to actually inspect them.
Several things that we're finding are things that could have been fixed years ago. We're
going to take care of the things that we know once we find a problem, and we're going
to take care of it. And that's what we're charged with doing.
The crews are here today to replace - or to repair - a broken lateral. The broken lateral
failed causing a street collapse. We have well over a hundred collapses a year.
One of the things I find is very few people really understand how massive the waste water
infrastructure is in the City here. We have two wastewater treatment plants that were
built back in the mid-50s.
There's over 800 miles of sewer lines spread throughout Evansville and into the County area.
The wastewater treatment plants process probably close to 30 million gallons a day.
It's phenomenal when you think about that, the amount of volume that we treat and process
every day.
To this point, we've simply been fixing the breaks. Typical sewer lines should last
from 50 to 80 years. Parts of the system are well over 100 years old.
So, we're just experiencing an increase in breakage and collapse simply because of
the age of the system. You know we spend 30 cents on the dollar if we can get ahead of
the problem before it becomes a major collapse. You know one of the main components of the
consent decree proposal that the City of Evansville has given the Department of Justice is green
infrastructure projects, and it's an attempt to collaborate with other departments and
their capital plans to incorporate storm water redirection from those projects.
The biggest is the back parking lot for the Civic Center, and it essentially eliminates
6 million gallons of storm water into our system every year. So it was a very successful
and a very cost beneficial project.
Two years ago we didn't do our own inspection in house. In fact, in 2011 we had to hire
those inspections out at the tune of $1.2 million. We completed those in house last
year, and we essentially reduced costs for the utility by $800,000.
We've had a lot of lift stations that we're rehabilitating with this program, as well.
We completed six of them last year. It's about catching up with a system that's been
somewhat neglected for the last 60 years. One of our largest capital investments are
these pipes that we never see. To catch up in 28 years for something that's been 60
years behind is, it's going to be a pretty big feat.