Sandpoint shows state, federal officials failings of wastewater treatment plant

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm is busy making the city’s case for an overhaul of the wastewater treatment plant at Lakeview Park — most recently bringing representatives from state and congressional offices on a tour of the facility to highlight its deficiencies.

“This is my No. 1 priority as mayor,” he told the group, which included staffers from the offices of Idaho Gov. Brad Little, U.S. Rep. Russ Fulcher, U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, and Keller and Associates, the firm contracted to produce the preliminary engineering report for the project, which is expected to be finalized at the regular Wednesday, Aug. 7 meeting of the Sandpoint City Council.

Sandpoint Mayor Jeremy Grimm, center, meets with Plant Supervisor Devan Hull, left. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

Grimm told the group of “horror stories” about the risk of uncontrolled discharges at the plant.

“We were inches away from this river literally having raw sewage flow into it,” he said. “[The plant is] beyond its useful life.”

Sandpoint’s wastewater treatment plant has been far past its prime for years. According to an informational page on the city’s website, parts of the facility date back to its original construction in 1955, using components from the Farragut Naval Station — many of which were already aged when they were repurposed. Meanwhile, city officials determined that the plant had reached the end of its functionality at least seven years ago, triggering the development of a 20-year facility plan in 2017.

In 2018, the Sandpoint City Council voted to keep the plant at the Lakeview site and pursue upgrades to critical systems while adding new technology to boost capacity. The price tag for that option is estimated between $59.6 million and $74.9 million. During the tour on July 24, Grimm put those costs at more like $60 million to $80 million and, in an interview with the Reader at City Hall, said he “wouldn’t be surprised if it pushes $100 million.”

“This will be the largest public works project outside of the byway in Bonner County history,” he said during the tour, noting that upgrades at the site would “take care of us for 40-plus years.”

A clarifier tank at the wastewater treatment plant. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

Grimm said the preferred timeline for completing the project is three-and-a-half years, though it’s going to be a heavy financial lift requiring a combination of local, state and federal dollars. Currently, the city is considering where to identify grant and loan monies, and Grimm added that City Hall will be going to the public for bonding authority in the next year and looking to bump up rates to accommodate “significant debt service.”

“I recognize it’s a huge amount of money,” Grimm said, underscoring that the purpose of the tour was to prime the delegations and state agencies to work with the city on securing grant funding. 

The city is planning to submit a letter of interest by Jan. 1 in order to go to the state for funding requests, hoping that between 12 and 16 months from now the project will begin its implementation phase. It remains to be seen, however, whether the work will take place incrementally or include a full teardown and rebuild. 

“It’s like flying an airplane and changing the wings while you’re flying it,” Grimm said.

Until then, Sandpoint residents might not realize it, but the wastewater flushed down their toilets is moving through a system that in some cases is literally patched together and operated by hand.

Plant Supervisor Devan Hull points out a leaking pipe inside the facility. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

Plant Supervisor Devan Hull was born in 1984, grew up in Sandpoint and started working at the facility in 2008. He oversees a staff of four operators and is hiring a new employee to focus on pre-treatment. He confirmed Grimm’s “horror stories” about close calls with sludge flowing uncontrolled into the Pend Oreille River.

“We would have had a nice black stream headed toward Priest River,” Hull said of one incident when a combination of weather events, poor drainage of the soil at the site and lack of an equalization tank to control variations in flow levels approached being a disaster.

“I would have packed up and moved to Florida. It would have made national news,” he said.

Hull took tour attendees throughout the plant, pointing out instances where critical systems are barely being held together. He pointed out that one blower used for aeration dates from the 1940s, but is still functioning despite “eating electricity like candy.”

Control panels in certain places are clearly of Cold War-era vintage, while in the digester — which also features aged pumps and pipes — operators had to purchase a commercial compressor at Home Depot because the previous component failed and there was no time to wait on the shipment of a replacement. 

Outdated technology in the plant. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

On one occasion, Hull said he had to resort to using a four-inch hose meant for an RV wastewater system to move waste from one part of the plant to another because a pump went out. Making matters worse, the pump failure happened in the winter, and while the hose stretched across the yard outside it froze.

“Most of my past five years has been, ‘How can we fix it quickly, efficiently and realize it’s probably not going to last for very long,’” Hull said, adding that there is very little — if any — redundancy in the system when some part of it inevitably breaks down.

“It is crazy how fragile it is,” he said later, noting that a few of the strange items that have ended up in the plant include a bag of clothing and a phone book that someone managed to flush into the system. Dental floss is the worst, as it becomes knotted with other solids and catches on everything else, potentially resulting in the breakdown of pumps or blockage of pipes. Also, Hull added, flushable wipes are not flushable, despite their marketing.

“The real problem is that this place has to operate 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. I can’t just turn it off — I mean, I could, but we wouldn’t like the result,” Hull said. “It’s literally the difference between a health hazard and not a health hazard.”

In one part of the facility, where solids are pressed into a low-water-content “cake,” a wrench had to be clamped onto one of the presses to hold part of it together. Ratchet straps also come in handy, while elsewhere a sledgehammer serves as an ersatz control lever. 

One of two solid waste presses. Photo by Soncirey Mitchell.

On top of that, one of the presses — without which the plant can’t process solids — is currently out of commission due to a broken belt, but “you can’t get parts for this anymore,” Hull said, pointing out that the presses themselves date back to 1984.

“It’s constantly running at red line,” Grimm said.

“My guys are really good at making things work with duct tape and baling twine,” Hull added.

Operators also have to perform critical functions like applying chemical treatments by hand and eye.

In the final phase of the treatment process — after the solids have been removed and insects and bacteria in the tanks have done their work — chlorine is added to kill off E. coli, then sulfur dioxide is introduced to dechlorinate the water before it is discharged via a pipe 980 feet out into the river.

There are no automatic flow monitoring or chemical application systems, so operators have to gauge the flows and introduce the chlorine and sulfur dioxide at levels they judge to be adequate for maintaining the proper levels. In most cases, if the facility experiences a water quality violation, it’s because of too much E. coli and not enough chlorine, or too much chlorine and not enough sulfur dioxide.

“These people are literally operating this with hand levers and real-time hydrology,” Grimm said, noting that a more modern approach would be to put in place a flow meter to provide constantly updating data to inform treatment levels. Another alternative might to be replace the chlorine treatments altogether with disinfection using ultraviolet light.

Despite that low-tech process, the chemical treatment phase is not cheap. The Sandpoint facility lacks the ability for onsite chlorine production, so the gas has to be shipped in large metal canisters, which are operated by a basic gas feed. Given the extreme danger posed by chlorine gas — “There’s enough chlorine in that building to wipe out half of Sandpoint,” Grimm said — only two tanks are armed at a time. The sulfur dioxide costs $3,000 a bottle and Hull said the plant houses well over $100,000 in chemicals.

“I see bills for $20,000-$30,000 every week,” Grimm said.

Perhaps most dramatic, the support structures inside the large metal lid on the solids holding tank gave way at one point, resulting in the lid falling into the tank. Hull said that a crane operator happened to be in the area with the necessary equipment to lift it out, and it now sits balanced on a concrete perch not far away. Hull has asked his operators to stay away from it for safety reasons.

Repairing the lid would cost about $500,000 and buying a new one would run about $1 million — what Hull considered a waste of money either way, since the repairs couldn’t be guaranteed and purchasing a new lid wouldn’t make sense if the whole plant is due to be upgraded.

“I’m concerned with literally keeping the shit in the plant,” Hull said.

Dan McCraken, who serves as North Idaho regional administrator for the DEQ, said that a potential hurdle for securing funding for improvements might be the success of Hull and his staff in keeping the plant functioning.

“Sandpoint has done such a great job of holding things together that it has not gotten the points because it hasn’t had the compliance issues,” he said.

Speaking to tour attendees, Grimm said, “I think everybody understands this is a time bomb,” later adding: “This isn’t a fun, want-to-do project.”