The Chattanooga City Council has approved an approximately $10 million contract for improvements to the Citico Pump Station at 975 Riverside Drive.
The contract with Haren Construction Company Inc. totals $10,166,200, which includes a 10% contingency of $924,200.
The project will be a general overhaul of the facility, including a new motor control center, cleaning and coating of the wet well plus the installation of new pumps, motors and drivers. Overall, the city aims to improve the capacity, performance and reliability of the station and expects the work will help reduce overflows of the sanitary sewage system in that area.
"It's just aged out, and capacitywise, it wasn't meeting the needs of the area," Mark Heinzer, interim director of the Moccasin Bend Environmental Campus, told the Chattanooga Times Free Press by phone Thursday.
(READ MORE: Chattanooga plans $513 million worth of improvements to sewer infrastructure)
City officials recently completed a project at the facility to provide bypass pumping and create redundancy in the system, which allows them to continue to operate the pump station as they rehabilitate it.
"In order to rehab a facility like this, you basically have to shut it down because you can't get in there and work while it's doing its job," Heinzer said. "We had to build a backup pump station adjacent to it before we could then get in and do this particular work."
There's a backup generator and pump system in place to keep operations going in the event of an incident like a power outage, he said.
Many of the sanitary sewers in that part of town drain by gravity, Heinzer explained, and the Citico Pump Station ultimately conveys the contents to a treatment plant.
In 2013, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency reached an agreement with the city, officially known as a consent decree, because its sewer system was struggling to handle the billions of gallons of sewage flowing through its pipes every year. Overflows sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of raw waste into the Tennessee River on an annual basis.
(READ MORE: Chattanooga, Hamilton County could see $25 million for sewer needs under state plan)
The consent decree resulted from a settlement the city reached after it was sued by the EPA, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation and a nonprofit organization called the Tennessee Clean Water Network.
Chattanooga leaders expect to conduct hundreds of millions of dollars worth of improvements to the city's sewer infrastructure between 2020 and 2030, building on investments they have made since 2013.
Officials have estimated that over the past five years, the volume of sanitary sewer overflows has decreased 82% even as rainfall increased 11% across the same time.
(READ MORE: Hamilton County Commission distributes about $30 million in federal funds)
Heinzer said the city has significantly reduced sanitary sewer overflows with the work it's completed.
"We've pretty much done a lot of elimination already with the whole consent decree program, but this is again just insurance and upgrading to current technology," he said about the project.
Contact David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6249. Follow him on Twitter @flavid_doyd.