Council gives OK to roof project

CELINA - City council members on Monday night green-lighted an estimated $300,000 water treatment plant improvement project that will clear the way to potentially add a new process to more efficiently treat the city's drinking water.

Councilors unanimously passed an ordinance authorizing city safety service director Tom Hitchcock to advertise and receive bids and execute an agreement to replace the roof and remove old lime silos and piping at the treatment plant. The project would be funded from the $8 million Ohio Environmental Protection Agency grant awarded to the city in 2016.

The legislation was passed as an emergency measure after councilors had suspended the rules requiring three public readings.

Plant superintendent Mike Sudman provided details.

"We're removing the third floor," he said, adding that floor contains old lime silos that are no longer used. "That roof's bad. The brick is bad. So we're going to remove it, go down to just the second level. There is a first level over the clarifiers. That is in a future project."

"After the lime silos are done, they'll put steel piling and then reconcrete that section of the roof and put a new rubber roof on it," he continued.

Sudman told the newspaper that the lime silos were replaced four years ago when officials switched from lime pebbles to liquid lime.

"It's just easier to maintain. The equipment was from 1974 so we replaced it four years ago with a different type," he said.

He also noted that as part of the project, basement piping that hasn't been used for 15 years will be gutted to make room for a future retrofitting of the plant's clarifiers.

Councilman June Scott asked if the project is being undertaken in anticipation of another project.

Sudman said some of the work is related to a second project, which would be to retrofit the plant's clarifiers.

Officials hope to have the improvement project completed by Oct. 10.

Councilman Jeff Larmore asked if the city would have problems finding contractors to get the work finished by the deadline.

"We're going to bid it and find out," Hitchcock replied. "We've had problems with every other job we've done this year."

"What's the driving force to get this done in October?" councilman Mike Sovinski asked.

"There's 60 tires holding the second floor roof down," Sudman said, adding the roof was installed in 1982.

Mayor Jeff Hazel in April announced the city would continue to draw its drinking water from Grand Lake into the future after an exhaustive, multiyear search of underground and surface alternatives came up dry.

Hazel, though, had said officials plan to further update the water plant to ensure drinking water meets any future Ohio Environmental Protection Agency standards.

Officials have launched a pilot study at the plant of new technology aimed at better removing organic solids from raw lake water in pretreatment. If the study is verified, officials would retrofit existing clarifiers, which pull solids from the raw lake water, with the technology to more efficiently treat drinking water, Hazel said.

Hazel this morning confirmed that the study has been initiated in fits and starts. Katharos Scientific LLC of Colorado had done preliminary work, including creating a prototype of the solid-removing technology, at a cost of $93,000. It was designed through Tri-Tech Engineering of Dayton, city administrators said in April.

The city in 2016 received an $8 million OEPA Drinking Water Solutions Grant. City officials must use the grant money either to relocate its water treatment facility, partner with another political subdivision to access water sources or establish pipelines to access suitable water resources or to treat drinking water.

City officials are committed to enhancing drinking-water treatment.

So far, $1.3 million has been spent for engineering services, an ozone replacement system and an advanced oxidation process using ultraviolet light that Sudman last year said would treat for "remaining disinfection byproducts prior to the chlorine being added, any kind of minute pharmaceuticals that could be remaining, algal toxins that could get through the carbon."

Hitchcock in April had said "the rest of this money is going to go to engineering and replacing the clarifiers with hopefully this pilot system we're doing, but we won't know that until we pilot it and see if it's approved through EPA."