Clean Water Initiative nearing end

By Julie Snyder
C & G Staff Writer

St. Clair Shores Mayor Robert Hison said the six years of work conducted by the Macomb County Public Works Department, with the assistance from the city, has been advantageous to the future of the community as well as surrounding cities.

“This has been a very important project in terms of improving our water system and the lake,” Hison said. “It has been critical because it’s improving our quality of life.”

To recognize the work, and take a peek at what is expected to be the final project of the initiative, Macomb County Public Works Commissioner Anthony Marrocco and local city leaders participated in a symbolic ribbon-cutting ceremony on Oct. 18 at the Chapaton Pump Station and Retention Treatment Basin on Nine Mile Road.

Marrocco praised the Lake St. Clair Clean Water Initiative, a six-year, $81.2 million pollution abatement project for St. Clair Shores, Eastpointe and Roseville, as another chapter in the Macomb County Public Works Office anti-pollution legacy.

“It is with great pride that we accepted the challenge of the Clean Water Initiative,” he said. “It is part of our legacy of cleaner water and a cleaner environment. The quest for cleaner water is a legacy that can be traced back decades ago.”

In the 1960s, the former Macomb County Drain Commission Office built the 28-million- gallon Chapaton basin and the Martin Basin to alleviate basement flooding in St. Clair Shores, Roseville and Eastpointe. The Eight Mile Road Drain was also built at that time as part of the fight against water pollution.

“Then came the challenge that confronted us in the mid-1990s with new pollution problems,” Marrocco said. That led to the Clean Water Initiative.

“After years of planning, meetings, public hearings and hard work, the project is substantially complete,” he said. “And Lake St. Clair is better for it.”

One of the highlights of the ribbon-cutting ceremony was the passing of the anti-pollution legacy onto the next generation of environmentalists. Marrocco presented a copy of a Michigan project performance certificate to Matt Witmer, a member of the South Lake High School Environmental Club, which recently launched a countywide campaign to encourage homeowners and businesses to use environmentally friendly lawn fertilizer.

The certificate notes that the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality has accepted and certified all of the work done on the project, said Dave Potter, an official with Spalding DeDecker Associates, one of the engineering firms involved in the initiative, Marrocco said.

Marrocco has also acted at chairman of an Inter-County Drainage Board that was created for the Lake St. Clair Clean Water Initiative.

The Clean Water Initiative was 36 separate projects. Among these projects was the construction of nearly six miles of new sanitary sewer and relief drains along Jefferson and also from Nine Mile Road to the Marter Road booster station. That allowed for the elimination of five emergency bypass pumps installed in the 1960s to pump combined storm water and sewage into Lake St. Clair and prevent basement flooding.

Another project completed over the years was the installation of throttling gates on the Nine Mile Drain and Martin Drain. The gates allow basin operators to control the flow in the system, reducing the overflows into Lake St. Clair.

About 150 damaged manholes and leaking sewer pipes were “rehabilitated” in all three communities to reduce how much storm water and ground water was seeping into the sewer system, and new control systems were built at Chapaton, including a 3-million-gallon overflow canal that expanded the detention capability at the basin. A state-of-the-art computer monitoring system has improved efficiency of the system.

Maria Sedki, of Spalding DeDecker, said the projects were financed through loans from the State Revolving Fund and the sale of bonds.

The next, and likely the final, step of the initiative will be the installation of television cameras into 14 miles of sanitary sewer lines in the hunt for leaking, damaged or blocked sewer pipes in St. Clair Shores, said John Chown, an engineer with Anderson, Eckstein and Westrick.

Chown said robot-controlled cameras about the size of a loaf of bread will be dropped through manholes into sewer lines throughout the city and will spend about three months probing the underground maze of concrete lines.

The $197,000 TV-monitoring project marks the second time that TV cameras are sent into Shores sewers.

“There are 150 miles of sewers in the city, and we basically televised every local sewer in the city from one end to the other, but for some reasons some sewers were missed the first time,” Chown said.

Chown said filming to assess the condition of the pipes is scheduled to begin Nov. 19 under the direction of Inland Water Pollution Control of Detroit. “We’re trying to investigate the condition of the sewers in the city,” he said. 

He said previous filming found 100 bad sewer pipes that had to be repaired, most of which were built in the ‘40s, ‘50s or ‘60s, Chown said.

“Overall, most were in need of some type of repairs,” he said. Some sewers were lined with an epoxy substance under a process called cured-in-place, which is basically like putting a new sewer inside an old one without having to replace it, Chown said.

One of the benefits of the citywide sewer repair project, in addition to the fact that it will prevent basement flooding and the creation of sinkholes, is that the city saves money because the repaired lines keep out ground water. Before the repairs, the water was sent to Detroit for treatment along with sewage and St. Clair Shores had to pay for it.

“We needed this help from the county,” Hison said.

You can reach Staff Writer Julie Snyder at jsnyder@candgnews.com or at (586) 498-1039.