The City of Jacksonville’s Waste Water Treatment Plant renovation is right on schedule.
The more than $12 million project for Phase I of the headworks broke ground this past September. Benton & Associates Principal Engineer Cameron Jones says that the first portions of the project have been mainly out of sight to the public: “The project is progressing right on schedule and going really well. Over the last 9 months, we dug down 30 feet and started building up. Now, we are above grade some with concrete about 15 to 20 feet, and there is still some underground piping left to do. Here in the next 2-3 months, we will be seeing structural steel arrive on site and start getting it erected. You’ll start seeing it popping up above the levee, so everyone will be able to see it from the highway.”
Jones says all of the traffic will be on site so there should not be any traffic congestion along Illinois Route 78 heading north out of Jacksonville.
The Jacksonville City Council voted to approve two major change orders to the project last Monday night. Jones says one change was due to an individual water service line into the property and the other involved masonry work that the city received no bids on: “There was a change order for replacing the water service into the site out from west of the highway in under the levee to the water meter. That was a 6-inch cast iron pipe from the 1960s, that when we dug past it to put in sewer pipe, we found that it was extremely brittle and broke multiple times in a short amount of time. The city deemed that it needed to be replaced while we had the site all tore up before we got beneath the roadways and all of that stuff around there. The other change order was tuck pointing the brick wainscoting around some of the buildings. It had failed over time just due to age. The City had put it out for bid proposals a month or two ago and had no bidders who returned a bid on the project. We went to the contractor on the head works project and asked them for a price for consideration on the project. They gave us a real good price on it, and the city council accepted the change order.”
The headworks phase is just part one of four phases that will see major upgrades at all portions of the waste water plant over the next decade. It’s the first major upgrades at the plant since 1992.
The upgrades are being required in part due to federal regulations on treated waste water that is emptied back into reservoirs, lakes, ponds, creeks and streams. The U.S. EPA has instituted a Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy to decrease the hypoxia zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River that empties into the Gulf of Mexico. Treated waste water has been measured to have high amounts of phosphorous that have helped increase the hypoxia zone in the Gulf. Municipalities up and down the Mississippi River have been tasked with getting their treated waste water to meeting lower levels of measurable phosphorous and other nutrients over the next decade.