LIMA — The Allen County Sanitary Engineer’s Office is putting out for bids for a project to reline the sanitary sewer lines in the Indianbrook subdivision and the older section of Meadowview Drive. Sanitary engineer Steve Kayatin told Allen County Commissioners Thursday that the estimated $173,000 project would include 4,700 linear feet of pipe in Indianbrook, as well as 1,750 linear feet on Meadowview Drive.
According to Kayatin, relining these pipes will help form a better seal, not so much to keep pipe contents from leaching out, but to keep stormwater from leaching in.
“It’s our infiltration flow of stormwater mediation program,” he said. “And it’s a program that will be ongoing for many years to keep stormwater out of the sanitary sewer system.”
Currently, if stormwater gets into the sanitary sewer system, it gets treated along with with sewer water, which can sometimes result in slower service or even service interruptions for some sanitary sewer customers, along with the higher costs of treating more water, which can fall on customers to pay.
“We’ve got to tackle this issue,” Kayatin said. “We’re knocking on doors to inspect inside houses to see if there are sump pumps, foundation tile or anything else connected to our sanitary system that needs to go into our stormwater system. That effort of in-house inspection, along with the work we’re doing to reline sanitary sewers, is going to help us achieve that goal and lower the costs to our customers because, right now, when that stormwater comes in, we’ve got to treat it.”
Kayatin acknowledged that these efforts will not completely eliminate stormwater from getting into the sanitary sewer system, but he maintained that any reduction would be a benefit.
“Can we get rid of 30 or 40 percent of it? It’s absolutely possible,” he said.
