Logan County PSD addressing "significant deficiencies" cited by state Department of Health

The Logan County PSD board says it's already working to address the "significant deficiencies" discovered by the West Virginia Department of Health at the Northern Regional Water Treatment Plant during a visit following the February floods.

MONAVILLE The West Virginia Department of Health says it’s not satisfied with current conditions at the Logan County PSD’s Northern Regional Water Treatment Plant.

PSD General Manager William Baisden said at a board meeting Tuesday that the health department visit resulting in the notice came shortly after the floods in February. At that time, severe conditions on the Guyandotte River following the floods interfered with the water plant’s intake line, resulting in nearly a week of persistent service outages throughout Logan County. Baisden said those issues brought a lot of attention to the county.

“As part of that attention, the state health department came down to the Northern Regional plant. In some of their walk through of the plant and of the grounds around the plant, they took some notes, and actually verbally told me that they would be sending me this letter of significant deficiencies with the Northern Regional Water Treatment Plant,” he said. “The deficiencies have to do with our pre-sedimentation basin and also our main tank that the plant pumps into.”

In order to address the issues with the plant’s main water storage tank, the health department says the tank has to be taken out of service entirely – something Baisden says would be impossible without residents experiencing a prolonged water outage.

“So, as part of the Northern Regional Water Treatment Plant Upgrade Project, we’re actually building another tank beside that tank,” he said.

He says once that secondary tank is built, crews will be able to shut down the primary tank and repair it without significant service interruptions for customers.

Engineer of Record Rick Roberts says the secondary tank will hold 800-thousand gallons of water, compared to the primary tank’s 1.5 million gallons. While he says a secondary tank has always been included in the plant’s design, it was not intended for the plant’s first phase of construction.

The issue Roberts says took everyone by surprise was the pre-sedimentation basin, which is a reservoir water passes through before reaching the plant. It allows most of the solids and organic matter to separate from the water, lessening the workload and prolonging the life of the treatment plant’s infrastructure. Baisden said the reservoir’s initial construction didn’t anticipate the amount of dirt and silt it would process over the years, resulting in the basin being overwhelmed.

Roberts said the current plan is to build two new reservoirs to replace the original, using more up-to-date systems to make the sediment removal more efficient.

“There’s going to be two concrete basins put in. They’re going to be a little bit more expensive, but they should be a lot more durable. There’s also a grit removal system that’s going to go over beside it and the water will flow through it,” he explained. “If you’ve ever swirled a coffee cup and seen the grounds in the bottom, that’s the way it removes the grit.”

The Northern Regional Water Treatment Plant is one of eight ongoing projects discussed during Monday’s meeting. Currently, the PSD has ongoing water and sewer projects across the county, including in Huff Creek, Holden, Coal Mountain, Mud Fork, Mitchell Heights and Chief Logan State Park.

PHOTO | Robert J. Fields