Monmouth City Council has approved a Combined Sewer Overflow Engineering Services Agreement with Woodard and Curran to conduct a study on ways to reduce overflow in the City’s combined sewer system, explains Public Works Director Brayden Bledsoe:
“In a newer system, you are typically required to have a normal sewer which would be for sanitary and then you have a storm sewer for gutter runoff or the ones in the street for all the rainwater. Since we have an older system, we have a lot of combined sewers in town. A part of that is your rainwater and your sanitary water run in the same pipes. When it comes to the EPA, when we have a large rain event, our systems are not sized to cover all that rainwater that can fall and we get so much rain that is will actually backup and have a separate treatment process and then eventually go into the creek,” says Bledsoe.
“The state only allows you to have four of those events per year. The past few years of data that I have looked at, we have been averaging from seven to ten of those events per year. So, this proposal is a proposal to do research and flow monitoring, flow metering, and modeling to figure out exactly what project we can complete to finish and remove all of those combined sewer overflow or at least make a vast improvement on them,” Bledsoe adds.
Bledsoe informs that the City of Monmouth has completed a number of projects in the past few years to reduce the number of overflow events, but this study will allow officials to determine the most cost-effective path.
