Fayetteville Council members March 10 were obviously pleased as shovels of dirt were flung into the air at the city’s wastewater treatment plant on First Manassas Mile, home to an $11.8 million system upgrade designed to meet Fayetteville’s needs for the next 20 years through the city’s build-out phase. The upgrade will effectively double the wastewater capacity to 5 million gallons per day (MGD).

Council members said the city’s largest public works project ever will provide a state-of-the-art facility, one that residents can be proud of and one that will serve the city well into the build-out phase.

“The build-out of Fayetteville is our only concern,” City Manager Joe Morton said Friday. “Best guess, looking at all the numbers and all the build-out projections, looking at vacant land within our corporate city limits, we’ve run the numbers on all that kind of stuff. [The wastewater treatment need] is somewhere around 4 million gallons per day, that’s what we are anticipating. Now that could vary. We’re trying to encourage a lot of re-development inside the city. If you get something a little more intense that may bump it up a little bit.

“The upgrade is also meant to give us a buffer for maintenance activities. Right now we’re basically at capacity. Maintenance had not been done on the existing plant since it was built in 1992 so we haven’t been able to take it down to do any heavy maintenance.”

Fayetteville Water and Sewer Director Rick Eastin said the system was originally handling 1.25 MGD and now processing 2.2 MGD on a system that can handle 2.5 MGD, the upgrade will handle the projected 4 MGD need with room to spare for system-wide maintenance activities.

“The original facility that was built in 1978 was shut down when we built the new facility in 1991 and all the flow was diverted to it,” Eastin said. “We did that with intention of, at a future time, coming back and rehabbing the existing facility with a higher capacity, utilizing all the tankage and things we could use.”

Of significant concern, said Eastin, is the capability of the upgrade to make possible the necessary maintenance operations of major system components, called treatment trains, that extends the functional lifetime of the entire system. Once completed, the system will have four operational treatment trains.

“A lot of communities take the attitude that they will build a facility just to meet their needs and then they ended up not being able to take any part of the facility off-line to do maintenance. You’ve got to have something as a back-up,” Eastin said. “With this upgrade we will be able to take any one of those treatment trains off-line at a time to do heavy maintenance on them, something we just don’t have the ability to do right now.”

Eastin said other facets of the upgrade include a sand filter system at the plant and a new 5 million gallon equalization basin across the road on First Manassas Mile.

Eastin explained, “We’re going to filter every drop of water that goes out of here prior to discharging it. And the equalization basin will give us better treatment through the process by keeping the flows more stable.”

Everything considered, city officials said the upgrade designed to meet Fayetteville’s wastewater system upgrade will easily handle the capacity needed when build-out occurs in the next 15 years and provide the means to perform needed maintenance tasks that will prolong the life of the system.

“So what we have planned is to provide the city with adequate treatment capacity now and at build-out and also to give us some room to do some maintenance along the way,” Eastin said. “Doing that reduces your cost. If you’re able to take a treatment train off-line on an annual basis to do cleaning and maintenance it makes the system last longer. You’ll be increasing it 20 to 30 years with proper maintenance.”

The last major capital improvement to the wastewater system occurred in 1991, according to information supplied by the city. It was determined in 2003 that 5 MGD was needed to provide system redundancy and capacity through the estimated 2025 build-out based on the existing service area.

Fairburn-based Reynold’s, Inc., was the low bidder and was awarded the upgrade project contract.

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