Bluefield Daily Telegraph, Bluefield, WV

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April 13, 2011

Welch sewer facility primed for long-awaited improvements

KATE COIL Associated Press

WELCH — The city of Welch’s wastewater treatment plant will soon be getting an upgrade in order to process more water and prevent dumping into local streams and creeks.

Danny W. Berry, project coordinator for the city of Welch, said the city is currently seeking bids to purchase and install more ultraviolet lamp modules as well as materials needed to prevent sewer overflow from being dumped.

Currently, Berry said the plant treats 700 gallons of water per minute and that number should double once more ultraviolet treatment lights are in place.”

“As part of the process for treating sewage, you run the water through a channel and the ultraviolet lights rid it of contamination and bacteria,” Berry said. “We are adding more so we can treat more water. This is important for us because the city of Welch has a combined sewer and stormwater treatment plant.”

In the coming months, Berry said the city is working to increase the amount of water and sewage it can hold.

“A lot of what we treat varies based on rainfall,” Berry said. “We have the capacity to hold much more water in the plant than we can treat. The equipment part of the plant will be upgraded to increase the capacity we can hold. When it rains, sometimes our system gets overloaded. We currently have nine outtakes and when too much rain comes in, we have to push some of the water out of our system so the system doesn’t rupture. It puts out small amounts of untreated water, which may have trace amount of pollutants, into streams and creeks.”

Part of this upgrade will be getting rid of one of the nine sewer outtakes, a project the city has been working on for 15 years.

“We’ve been working for many years to slowly get rid of all of the outtakes,” Berry said. “It costs about $1.3 million to get rid of a single outtake in one part of the city and as part of this, we will be working to get rid of part of one of the outtakes. We originally had 28 outtakes and we’ve worked to eliminate 20 of those since the system went online in 1996. We have to do a quarterly report to the EPA. The EPA gives us permission to pollute temporarily because they know we can’t eliminate these outtakes overnight. It would cost too much to do that.”

Though the project would not be expanding the plant, Berry said the upgrades would make things cleaner for the nearly 1,000 residents and businesses that use the treatment plant.

“We serve just under 1,000 customers, but that doesn’t include the number of people,” Berry said. “One of the places we serve is the Stevens Correctional Facility and that one customer has 600-plus people. I would estimate the plant serves between 2,500 and 3,000 people in the area. We are trying to make our system cleaner and greener.”

— Contact Kate Coil at kcoil@bdtonline.com

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