Date: Fri 05-Jul-1996

Publication: Bee

Author: ANDYG

Quick Words:

sewer-treatment-plant

Full Text:

with cut: Treatment Plant Construction Under Way

B Y A NDREW G OROSKO

In an isolated corner of Newtown where few people ever venture, a construction

project valued at $8.8 million is well underway.

Under searing July skies, scores of workmen supervised by C.H. Nickerson and

Company, Inc, of Torrington are constructing a sewage treatment plant to be

used by the sewer systems serving the town and the Fairfield Hills grounds.

The plant will have a treatment capacity of almost one million gallons of

wastewater daily. The town has reserved about one-third of that handling

capacity. The plant has been designed so that it can be expanded to handle two

million gallons of wastewater daily.

The sewage plant will provide three levels of wastewater treatment. Added

treatment will reduce the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus leaving the plant

and entering Tom Brook, the Pootatuck River, the Housatonic River, and

eventually, Long Island Sound.

An overarching crane Tuesday lifted hulking steel plates into place to form

the sewage plant's water clarification tanks.

Laborers worked on a vast network of steel reinforcing bars being positioned

for a concrete foundation for the plant's headwaters.

The treatment plant site, which occupies about seven acres, has been laid out

so that areas holding buried archaeological artifacts of potential

significance will be left undisturbed during construction.

Typically, treatment plants are the first components of a sewer system to be

built. But because excavation at the site was required to determine the area's

archaeological significance, plant construction was delayed. The plant is

expected to be complete by September 1997.

In diggings at the site in 1995, archaeologists found numerous projectile

points dating back about 4,000 years. Native Americans of the Late Archaic

period had recurring seasonal occupations in the area, which is characterized

by verdant fields and meandering streams.

Due to local topograhical conditions, four, or possibly five, sewage pumping

stations will be built to carry sewage to sections of the sewer system where

it can then flow to the treatment plant under the force of gravity.

A set of box culverts soon will be placed across a brook, providing an area to

place a road to link the end of Commerce Road to the sewage plant site, said

John Whitten, chief inspector on the sewer project for Fuss and O'Neill, Inc,

the town's consulting civil engineers.

The road across the brook will make the treatment plant site more accessible.

In 1992, town voters approved $34.3 million in bonding to build a municipal

sewer system to rectify groundwater pollution problems in the Borough, Taunton

Pond North and Sandy Hook Center. Sewer line installation has been underway

since November 1994. The sewer system is expected to be complete in late 1997.