ABINGDON, Va. – With close to $95 million of water and sewer projects in the pipeline, Washington County is embarking on the biggest capital improvement plan in its history, said Robbie Cornett, general manager of the Washington County Service Authority.
“We’re going to have a lot of construction going on here,” Cornett said.
The work will translate into jobs for contractors – more than 100 are likely to be created in Washington County alone – and better water and sewer service for residents.
“In this day and age, everybody who’s a taxpayer deserves clean water and sanitary sewer service,” said Patsy Osborne, a county resident who circulated a petition nine years ago in support of bringing sewer service to homes in the Interstate 81, Exit 13 area.
New sewer lines for homes near that interchange are among the 40-plus projects that will be in progress soon and paid for using federal stimulus dollars.
“These projects were on our radar screen long before there was ever talk of stimulus,” Cornett said. But now, there is money available to complete them.
Now is a good time to build, Cornett said: Construction costs stabilized; and grants, loans and special interest-reducing bonds from the federal government have significantly cut the expenditures necessary to build water and sewer infrastructure.
He also said that he’s hopeful all of the major water projects will be under way within the next year.
Meeting the needs
Ask Vickie Yates about the new water line that will run past her home along Tumbling Creek Road, and the first thing she’ll tell you is she spent a small fortune to drill a well only to learn she’ll have to shell out more money for a connection to city water.
But the longer she talks, the less critical she is of the idea, even though it comes with a monthly bill.
“My children seem happier about it because we’ve got a little bit of sulfur [in the water],” Yates said. “It doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers everyone else.”
Her husband thinks the new water connection will be “the best thing there ever was,” she said, and they’ve been told their property value will increase because of the access.
Plus, with public water instead of well water, they’ll no longer have to pull out the washing machine to clean the mineral deposits from of the drain, she said, and they won’t run the same risk of water contamination.
Her neighbor, Ima Johnson, is looking forward to increased water pressure – and not having to worry about her water supply getting low in dry weather.
Johnson said she pumps water up the hill to her house from a spring, the same water source the house has used for a century or more. In the little cove where she lives along Tumbling Creek, the water flows gracefully over the rocks, and fields of wildflowers bloom around century-old wooden structures.
“The spring comes down from the mountain. It’s very good water, but we don’t have very much pressure,” Johnson said. “We were doing OK without [public water], but being they’re putting it through here, they’re making it a little bit more convenient.”
Ray Henderson, another neighbor, said it’s about time.
“It should’ve been up here a long time ago,” Henderson said of the water line. “Now they need to get the road hard-topped.”
Henderson said he’s always had to be mindful of the limits of using a well for a water source; it leaves few options for keeping the dust down along the gravel road because using his well to wash the house or spray the road could run it dry.
“Water, you know, it’s just handy to have water,” he said.
Water projects
Among the 38 water projects in the works, the four topping the list as the most expensive are also the most important, Cornett said.
1. The biggest ticket item is replacing 200 miles of galvanized steel water pipe. The $30 million project will be done in three phases.
Cornett said the line is responsible for 75 percent of the county water system’s leaks and breaks, and costs more than $1 million a year to maintain.
“When you couple that with 40 percent of our customers being directly connected to that pipe, poor water quality and poor water quantity through these pipelines are all indicators that this pipe is in desperate need of replacement,” Cornett said.
Galvanized pipe is relatively inexpensive but not very durable, particularly with the soil conditions in Washington County, so it starts leaking at a high rate after 20 years, Cornett said.
Much of the county’s water system was put together in a piecemeal fashion in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And now, roughly 8,000 customers are connected to galvanized line.
“A lot of it was groups of residents taking a plow and plowing a furrow and dropping a water line in the ground and covering it back up,” Cornett said. “The good part about that is that people were able to get water fairly rapidly.”
But no one knew the pipe would corrode so quickly, he said.
The line will be replaced with something more durable, something that is expected to last for the next 75 years.
2. The $26 million water plant expansion and upgrade – to a 12 million gallon a day capacity – should provide adequate service for the next 30 years.
“Our water plant is at its capacity [now], and so to facilitate any further growth really in Washington County we had no choice but to expand our water treatment plant,” Cornett said. “Of course we’ve talked to BVU [Bristol Virginia Utilities] about purchasing additional water, but they’re limited in the capacity of water they can sell us.”
3. The 4-inch pipe running along Reedy Creek Road is a main conduit conveying water to western Washington County, but it is old and half the size it needs to be.
Cornett said the line should be at least 8 inches in diameter; that replacement project will cost $4.4 million.
4. How much does it cost for a 4-million-gallon water tank? About $5 million.
Cornett said the system’s existing watertank, which holds one million gallons, is in need of repair and way too small, so the service authority is building a new one.
“It’s one of those projects where we’re trying to prevent a problem, not cure a problem,” Cornett said, “so unless that problem boils down to the customer level, they won’t even know that it’s built.”
Beyond those four largest projects, millions more will be spent to replace and extend lines and other pieces of the water system. Among the larger of those projects are three line extensions along Rich Valley Road, at a cost of $1.1 million, $1.2 million and $1.4 million. Also on the list, a $2.7 million line replacement in the White’s Mill Road area and a $1.5 million water tank replacement in Abingdon.
Sewer projects
The main sewer project the service authority is tackling – among the seven ready to go – is in the Exit 13 area, where some 40 households in subdivisions around the interchange, including Osborne’s, have seen their septic systems fail in recent years.
“That was never designed to be a permanent solution,” Cornett said of the septic systems for those neighborhoods. “In the final analysis, they have a finite life and they will eventually fail.”
Osborne said the project is way overdue.
When the project is complete, “we won’t have to worry about sewage backing up into our homes,” she said. “We won’t have to worry about taking our laundry to the Laundromat. We won’t have to put up with the odor.
“In this day and time,” she said, “it’s uncalled-for to have these things going on.”
The problem, Osborne said, is more than old septic systems. The red clay soil doesn’t percolate well, causing trouble when there is a lot of rain.
When she circulated the petition, she said, more than 500 residents of the Westwood, Westwood View, Whisperwood and Foxfire subdivisions signed on.
Cornett said someone with a failing septic system who has sufficient land can build a new septic system for $6,000 to $8,000 or an alternative system for $20,000.
“If you don’t have land for either of those options, then you don’t have another option,” he said. “If the health department doesn’t condemn the property, then at the very least you’re faced with the practical aspects of having it pumped as often as needed when it starts backing up into the home or going out to do your laundry.”
Cornett said he’s hopeful the $4.1 million Phase I of the project will be awarded this summer; it will cover the Westwood and Westwood View subdivisions plus a small section of Old Jonesboro Road, providing service to 218 potential customers.
Phase II will cover Lee Highway from the airport to Cruz Drive, about 1,000 feet west of the Moonlite Drive-In.
Phase III will cover Foxfire and a small part of Westwood.
Meanwhile, Cornett said, those who have septic systems should take good care of them: flush nothing but toilet paper; do not use a garbage disposal or dump anything oil-based down the drain; and have the system inspected every two years and pumped by a licensed professional.
Modernizing the coalfields
While Washington County might be tackling the largest set of projects, other counties are also pushing to expand water service with the help of economic stimulus funds.
In Russell County, Steve Breeding, project manager for Thompson and Litton, said economic stimulus money could pay for some significant water and sewer extensions.
“It would probably put us five or six years ahead of our predicted plan right now,” Breeding said of the impact if the county receives all of the stimulus money it’s seeking.
“If you’re going to stimulate the economy, the best way to stimulate the economy is to build infrastructure, something that will be there for years and years and it may generate some growth and development,” he said.
The short-term effect might be in construction jobs, Breeding said, but the long-term effect will be in preparing areas of the county for development.
In Buchanan County, Public Service Authority Executive Director Darrell Cantrell said the county could be just five years away from providing service to everyone.
Among the plans: a $40 million water line replacement that includes a main trunkline. Cantrell said the line, now 16 inches in diameter, loses up to half the water along the way – and it’s too small to bring water to unserved areas of the county. He’s hoping for stimulus money to cover the cost.
Cantrell said he also hopes to get an $8.3 million project under way by mid-summer in the Hurley area, Phase II in a five-phase water project. Various smaller projects, including a $4.5 million water line extension to Haysi, also are in progress.
“Water systems throughout the state are in a lot of the same need of repair,” Cantrell said. “If we’re going to keep going forward, we’ve got to back up and do some of our old infrastructure.”
He said the county is seeking stimulus money for the biggest project, though the county’s water infrastructure is typically funded by various government programs with some help from coal companies, who are often blamed for damage to water sources.
He said most people who have water sources in the county either lack quantity or quality; some are filtering with four different systems to try to make their water drinkable, while others must have water delivered by truck.
Unfortunately, he said, funding is usually limited.
In the coalfield counties, Cantrell said, the geology has been so fractured by coal mining and natural gas exploration that a lot of traditional water sources have simply ceased to exist.
He said more money from those extractive industries should be used to provide the necessities in areas impacted by them: clean water.
“The availability of good, clean, safe, dependable drinking water, it’s a necessity, but in our area here it’s almost a luxury to have it,” he said. “I want to provide the opportunity for anybody that wants water to be able to hook up, and if we keep getting money then we’ll make it happen.”
He said Southwest Virginia counties face several challenges, including steep terrain, which makes water system construction complicated and expensive.
After a December snowstorm knocked out electricity for weeks in parts of the county, the authority also is reviewing alternative ways to provide power to the system’s 68 pump stations.
“We’re wanting to put generators in strategic spots to be able to help us provide water in case of emergency situations,” he said.
Sewage also is a concern, Cantrell said, but the authority has its work prioritized: First, it must get water to everyone.
“You can live without sewer,” he said, “but you can’t live without water.”
Catalyst for strength
In Washington County, Cornett said, it’s an exciting time.
“We see it as preventing catastrophic water shortage or outage problems in our system, and … we’re undertaking these projects in a time in our history when the access to grant and low-interest loan monies are [available] at an unprecedented rate,” he said. “For that reason, not only should our customers appreciate higher quality service as a result of these projects but will appreciate them in less cost in the monthly bill.”
The funding received for these projects, he said, will be “the catalyst for making our water system and consequently the county strong for generations to come.”
dmccown@bristolnews.com | (276) 791-0701
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