GREENFIELD – Progress continues to flow at the new wastewater treatment plant under construction in Greenfield.
The city’s wastewater utility manager, Nicholas Dezelan, said he’s cautiously optimistic the plant is on target to go live by late October.
“Everything is kind of on track to start doing equipment testing in the next month or two,” he said. “We’re doing pretty good for a project this size.”
That’s great news, considering the current plant continues to struggle to keep up with demand.
“We’re dealing with system failures this morning,” Dezelan shared Thursday morning.
“It’s up and down. We’re running on normal dry weather, but we’re still pushing the plant capacity to its limits. If we get into (wet weather), then we definitely go over our capacity rating,” he shared.
When the system backs up odors can be emitted from manhole covers and lift stations, but Dezelan said that problem should be greatly minimized once the new plant comes online.
“With the new equipment and new tanks we’ll be able to get that water pumped out a lot quicker,” he said.
The new eight million-gallon facility is being built to replace the current four million-gallon plant at 809 S. State St., just northeast of State Road 9 and Davis Road.
The new plant sits directly south of the current one, which is just east of Park Cemetery.
Dezelan said a new access drive has been built to the new plant just west of Brandywine Park.
The wastewater treatment plant project started in the fall of 2022, when COVID-related supply chain issues were stalling projects around the world.
City officials announced an estimated price for the new plant to be about $39 million in early 2020, but saw the numbers rise to upward of $73 million, which Dezelan said had a lot to do with the increased supply chain costs.
Another part of the rising estimate was due to the unexpectedly high cost of removing trash from an old city dump to make way for the new plant, a major excavation project that eventually grew to a 50-by-50-foot area, up to 20 feet deep in some spots.
“It kind of caught us by surprise by how deep the trash was,” said Dezelan, who called the time-consuming excavation costly but necessary.
“You don’t want to put a brand new building on an unsuitable sub base,” he said.
Aside from the increased expense of the trash removal Dezelan said construction costs have only gone up within $100,000 of the original contract with F.A. Wilhelm Construction, “which is pretty phenomenal to be that close to the contracted price this far along,” he said.
Dezelan added that the new state-of-the-art treatment plant is adaptable to meet future growth and changing needs, should new regulations be put in place.
The plant can also perform testing and maintaining on phosphorus levels, something the current plant cannot do.
The city continues to work in tandem with the Indiana Department of Environmental Management to assure all the i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed on the path towards switching to the new plant in Ocober, said Dezelan.
