The Town of Pagosa Springs sent out an emergency message to downtown residents yesterday evening:
EMERGENCY NOTICE: Wastewater System Alert – Your Help Needed!
The PSSGID Wastewater System is experiencing a critical situation. Pump Station #2 has failed as of this afternoon, on top of a previous issue related to a recent lightning strike.
This combination of failures is putting extreme pressure on the remaining system, which has already been working overtime while replacement parts arrive.
How YOU can help right now:
To minimize added strain on the system, please limit the amount of water going down the drain in all forms.
Only flush solid waste and minimize flushing liquid waste
Take shorter showers and baths
Avoid using the sink, washing machine, and dishwasher
We urgently need community-wide support to minimize stress on the wastewater system until repairs can be made. The GID is actively working to locate and deliver a replacement pump as quickly as possible. We’ll keep you updated as soon as we have more information. Thank you for doing your part to protect our system and prevent further disruptions!
The situation was further clarified yesterday evening at a public meeting convened to discuss — of all things — the deferred maintenance of the Town’s sewer system, which is operated by the Pagosa Springs Sanitation General Improvement District, (PSSGID)…
…not to be confused with the Pagosa Area Water and Sanitation District (PAWSD).
PAWSD is a separate district but partners with PSSGID to treat the Town’s sewage. The PSSGID collects wastewater from within a portion of the town limits — basically, from Harman Park and going east down Put Hill, through downtown, and a short ways out Highway 160 past the Highway 84 intersection.
PAWSD, meanwhile, collects the wastewater from the commercial businesses and residences west of Harman Park as far as the Trails/Chris Mountain subdivisions, and out Piedra Road to Lake Hatcher.
The PAWSD system is not in an emergency situation.
The PSSGID abandoned its outdated lagoon-based sewer treatment system in 2016 and began pumping all its wastewater seven miles, uphill, to the PAWSD Vista Treatment Plant located near the Vista mobile home park.
Within a few years, it became glaringly apparent that the pipeline had been poorly engineered — perhaps, criminally so — as evidenced by constant failures of the expensive pumps operating the system. Major improvements were implemented with the help of a different engineering firm, after it was determined that the original pumps were “woefully undersized for the distance we had to push.”
Each pump station requires four pumps, in order to operate efficiently. At last night’s public meeting, Town Public Works Director Karl Johnson explained that one of the two ‘pump stations’ that operate the system had been affected by a lightning strike back in April, and now one of the remaining pumps was apparently pushed beyond its limit.
Unfortunately, the new pumps were of unique design and not widely available, and the cost was about $80,000 each. The current price is closer to $140,000 each, The Town was able to buy replacement pumps at the original price because they agreed to buy the needed replacement pump plus two emergency spares.
But the Town has been waiting for three months for the replacement pumps to arrive, and expects to wait a couple more months.
Thus, the emergency situation.
Tomorrow, I will be writing about the rest of the public meeting, where we heard about ideas for addressing the failures within the downtown collection system that delivers the sewer to the pumping system.
Another big can of worms.