Following last week’s overflow event that let untreated wastewater into Bristol Harbor and forced the closure of the Harbor to shellfishing for most of the remainder of the month, Town Administrator Steven Contente met with Community Development Director Diane Williamson, Water Pollution Control Superintendent Jose DaSilva, and Beta Group engineers Chris Cronin, Senior Vice President, and Brian Wrigley, Senior Project Manager, to take a deep dive into Bristol’s sewers to see what went wrong.

“I wanted to meet with Jose and our consulting engineers to see if there's anything we're missing on our long-term plan to improve the collection system and the treatment facility,” said Contente. “And what we're determining, what we've been advised, is to keep sticking to the the plan that we're on.”

“We had roughly 14 million gallons going through the facility, and the volume was just too much,” said DaSilva of the last rain event. “With the population that's in this town, we should be seeing 3.8 million gallons rain or shine, and when we have rain events where we're seeing the 13 or 14 million gallons, it’s like trying to put 10 pounds in a 5 pound bag.”

But rain alone did not cause the overflow, and with these rain events increasing in frequency and severity, it takes a tremendous amount of planning and oversight to stay ahead of the ball.

Bristol’s sewer system is a closed system, and it is separate from the stormwater system. Sewage pipes transport sewage to the Wastewater Treatment Plant, it is treated and, ideally, only then released into the Harbor. The storm water system, mainly road drainage, is a totally different system that's maintained by the Department of Public Works. The Town has about 100 miles of sewer lines, some of which is 100-year-old clay. It’s porous, sustaining damage from roots and vibrations, and while it’s being upgraded incrementally, it’s a massive undertaking.

Just recently, with the help of a $7.8 million loan from the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, the town’s wastewater treatment facility was treated to a number of upgrades to equipment, some of which was upwards of 30 years old. The improvements included new settling tanks, dewatering equipment, a sludge blending tank with an aeration and mixing system, sludge pumping equipment, replacement of conveyance systems, rehab of a gravity thickener tank, odor control upgrades, structural and site improvements, heating and ventilation instrumentation, and an electrical distribution system overhaul.

“At no time did we think that any of the money spent to date was going to completely resolve the issue,” said Cronin. “The Town has been spending a lot of money on upgrades to their pumping stations, which is critical, their plant, which is critical, and their collection system, which is critical. But the underlying issue is town-wide. It's extra water getting in the system.”

So where is it coming from?

Some fresh water is infiltrating the pipes that have yet to be slip-lined, but sump pumps, roof drains, and even Bristol Harbor itself is making its way into our sewers.

Property owners who do their part eligible for $1,000 reimbursements

“Bristol has poorly draining soils and the groundwater table is high in a lot of locations,” said Cronin. “So as homes were built they were built with provisions to keep basements dry whether that was sump pumps or in some cases foundation drains, and a lot of those drains are relieved into the sewer.”

There’s long been a town ordinance against connecting your sump pump to the sewer, for a very good reason. If all those illicit connections were re-plumbed, it would go a long way toward removing the extraneous water that is causing these overflows “It’s town-wide; every section of town is contributing to the problem.”

The Town would like to hear from property owners with illicit connections to the sewer system, not to arrest you or publicly shame you. They want to give you money.

Any homeowner that has a sump pump that's tied into the sewer system can get reimbursed for up to $1,000 if they get it plumbed into their yard.

“In some cases we allow it into the storm system,” said Contente. The Town has about $100,000 earmarked for such reimbursements, but only a handful of people have taken advantage of the opportunity. “It hasn't been as successful as we thought it was going to be, but we really want people to know that’s available.”

How do you know if you have an illicit connection (assuming you did not do it)? According to DaSilva, find your sump pump and follow the pipe. “If the pipe leads into the other piping of the house, chances are good,” he said.

“There's always new homeowners that don't know this, and new people moving the town, so we need to keep reminding people that we have two systems, and our sewer system is closed,” said Contente.

Ferry Road shoreline pipe to be eliminated

Another contributor to the issue, that brings climate resiliency into the discussion, is the Ferry Road shoreline pipe, which runs underground, along Bristol Harbor on the private properties on the west side of Ferry Road. When the Harbor is exceptionally high, the manholes on these properties can get infiltrated with seawater.

The Town, and the property owners impacted, have long known that this line would need to abandoned in the not-too-distant future. In addition to the private residences on the west side of Ferry, Blithewold, the Columban Fathers, and VanWickle Lane all rely on that sewer line. Fortunately, when the sewer line to Roger Williams University was enlarged five years ago, DaSilva and the engineering team had the foresight to add lateral stubs all along that line, up to the homeowner’s property lines, consulting with the homeowners on the location of the stubs.

“We already have a connection there,” said DaSilva. “The homeowners will have to install a pump to connect to those laterals that are in place.”

Those connections will be fairly straightforward — it’s the VanWickle neighborhood that will have to be served by a new low pressure system; their sewage will need to be pumped some distance to reach the main Ferry Road line. Similarly, Columban Fathers will require an extension of the low pressure sewer system, and they will have to connect to that.

“So it's the construction of the sewer as well as the connection that they would need,” said Wrigley. “The low pressure system is small diameter pipe, and it's usually shallow construction. And then each property would have to get a what they call a grinder pump on their property.”

Show us the money

The next steps in the ongoing sewer system upgrades?

“We’ve got some collection system rehabilitation planned,” said Wrigley. “We're also going to do preliminary design and evaluation for the elimination of the Ferry Road shoreline pipe.”

But first we have to secure the funding. Contente plans to approach the state’s infrastructure bank for some, and if successful the engineering work could start as early as July 1, the beginning of the state's clean water fiscal year. Preliminary design and evaluation alone is expected to cost about $130,000. And the plan is to ask for another $500,000 to continue with the annual collection system repairs.

“You have to understand, we have close to 100 miles of sewer main, some of it 100 years old,” said DaSilva. “We have 11 pump stations. We have all the equipment at the facility itself…there's just so many moving parts…So if we can spend the money now and shore up these aged mains, we're ahead of the game.”

Bristol is not the only coastal community that had overflows earlier this month; New Bedford and Fairhaven also has issues that have closed shellfish beds.

“I did ask the question, what could we do to stop this?” said Contente. “The only solution would be to do what the Narragansett Bay Commission did.”

At a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, they used the same type of equipment that was used to dig the Chunnel between England and France, and created several tunnels at a depth of about 150 feet between the Fields Point Facility in Providence. It’s effectively an enormous holding tank that prevents overflow by becoming a channel full of excrement in what would otherwise be an overflow scenario.

“Bristol could never afford it,” said Contente. “So the only other thing we can do is exactly what we're doing — steadily improving our system.”