Not one but two water projects have been going on in Lake Ontario this summer, very near the same location off the Webster shore.
One, dealing with disposal of treated waste water, is being undertaken by the town and village of Webster; the other, dealing with drinking water, is being done as part of the Monroe County Water Authority’s East Side Water Supply Project. The same contractor, Bidco from Grand Island, N.Y., happens to be working on both projects. For the town project, crews have been replacing a pipe, on the bottom of the lake, that takes discharges from the town’s wastewater treatment plant on Phillips Road and the village’s plant on Webster Road.
That project, costing about $900,000, is expected to be complete by late September, said Gary Kleist, Webster’s commissioner of public works. Crews are anchoring the new pipe to concrete blocks on the lake bottom, he said.
The county project started in early May, said Dick Metzger, executive engineer for the water authority, but it isn’t slated for completion until late summer 2011. “Right now, we have an intake and outfall being drilled in the lake; we have to go down 150 feet vertically — that’s the blasting people are hearing — and we’re down to 100 feet, so we have 50 more feet to go,” Metzger said.
The past
Metzger said the county project, which has been “in the works for 40 years,” will include a new pump station and water treatment facility on Basket Road in Webster. Environmental work for the project was done in the late 1990s, he said. According to documents on the water authority’s website, the project is intended to increase the capacity, reliability, energy efficiency and security of the authority’s public water supply system by providing it with an alternate source of drinking water. Currently, drinking water is produced in Greece and pumped across the county, Metzger said. The project locations are in the towns of Webster and Penfield.
Kleist said the need for a new pipe was discovered when two staffers who are certified divers and do regular inspections found it all broken on the lake floor last year. Since the pipe “gets the effluent further off shore and concentrates the flow,” he explained, it had to be replaced.
The future
The whole county project is expected to be complete, up and running by January 2013. The vertical pipe for which drilling is being done now, Metzger said, is how a tunnel under the lake will be connected to a new pump station. That about mile-long horizontal tunnel will be drilled over the winter, starting in October, he said, and be complete by spring. Kleist said that as far as the town’s pipe project goes, “we want to get out of there before the weather changes.” He said the old metal pipe has been replaced with a plastic one which won’t corrode, which is an advantage, but the disadvantage is that the plastic floats, so its harder to tie town. “Long-term, however, this should be better,” he said.
