Last week the city’s main pumping station at the Atlantic Avenue treatment plant was full.
The place that starts the treatment process for all of Thunder Bay’s sewage was full, 60 feet from top to bottom, after last week’s flood.
On Wednesday, crews were in the now relatively dry station, removing an 800 horsepower motor that is part of one of five main pumps that sends the sewage on its way to an overhead channel to the other treatment facilities at the plant.
When fully operational, the station now has two pumps running thanks to the support of temporary pumps that were running within two hours of the flood, it has the capacity to handle 750 megalitres of water per day.
“We have limited capacity here in this facility still. Normally we have five pumps, right now we only have two pumps,” City infrastructure manager Darrell Matson said.
Matson said there is no way to let all of that water and sewage out at once despite what some people may think.
“There is no switch to bypass that pumping station,” Matson said on a media tour of the facility Wednesday afternoon.
“When we have an event to the magnitude that we had on May 28th if there was a switch or a gate or a valve that valve has to be below ground and if you opened it you’d essentially be letting all the water from the Neebing, McIntyre or any other area into the system.”
Since the flood, there have been around 100 workers on site to get the plant back to normal.
Other crews are still busy with a part of the plant, built in 1964, that is still flooded. Matson said that’s where they believe a breach of some kind happened. A new strategy to find the leak, or infiltration, will see closed circuit cameras exploring outside of the building, which goes underground.
“We know there’s got to be something somewhere around here,” Matson said standing outside of the building.
While waste water reduction by people in the city continues to help with rebuilding efforts at the plant, Matson said rain is still a concern. Starting Friday, five days of rain are called for.
“It really depends upon the amount and intensity,” Matson said. “We have our eye to the weather.”
