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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 26, 2016)
8A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • FRIDAY, AUGUST 26, 2016 Water: ‘We have aging infrastructure across the nation’ Continued from Page 1A The city pays to pump and treat water, so money is lost when some of that water leaves the system, doesn’t reach a paying customer or isn’t accu- rately metered. “If you have an old meter, it can be as much as 20 percent off,” Dunn said, “so the cus- tomers would be billed 20 per- cent less, basically.” Iniltration and inlow On the wastewater end, cracks in pipes pull groundwa- ter into the sewage system — a process called “iniltration” — before reaching a pump sta- tion or the wastewater treat- ment plant. Added to this is the water “inlow” from cross-connected pipes, like residential down- spouts, that should be con- nected to the city’s separate stormwater system rather than the sewage system. During wet weather, as much as 50 percent of the water that enters the wastewa- ter treatment plant should not be in there. Iniltration and inlow (I/I) reduces capacity at the plant, and the greater low is more Erick Bengel/The Daily Astorian This sequencing batch reactor is part of Warrenton’s wastewater treatment plant, which — in addition to the water flowing in — will also treat a lot of groundwater that leaked into the sewage pipes during periods of wet weather. energy intensive — and more expensive — to treat. “We can only handle so much water through the (wastewater) treatment plant,” Dunn said, adding that “if we go over that amount, then we would violate our permit.” Capacity and growth Water leakage and I/I are not unique to Warrenton. “We have aging infrastructure across the nation,” Dunn said. “These pipes don’t last forever.” Though the city has long discussed the costly cracks, Paciic Coast Seafood’s plans to rebuild in Warrenton got the city thinking more deeply about the issue. The compa- ny’s former Warrenton loca- tion burned down in 2013. Paciic Coast Seafood is “such a big user of water, which is really good because that makes money for the city,” Community Develop- ment Director Skip Urling said. “But all that water has to go into the sanitary sewage treatment system.” The promise of more indus- try and more residents moving into town is prompting the city to assess the capacity at the wastewater treatment plant — how much low it can handle — so Warrenton’s discharge doesn’t overwhelm the sewage system. As Warrenton grows, the city will need to expand the treatment plant, an expensive project that will become neces- sary much sooner if a 50-per- cent iniltration and inlow continues to eat up capacity. “You’re saving future costs by eliminating I/I,” Dunn said. In progress A crew recently repaired the leaking transmission main from the Lewis and Clark River to the water treatment plant. And the city is currently ixing the defective meters and installing new meters in unme- tered areas, like at the Warren- ton Mooring Basin. For this iscal year, the City Commission raised the city’s water rates 7 percent and sewer rates 6 percent to compensate for years of post- poning rate hikes that support Warrenton’s infrastructure. The rates, which will be revisited on an annual basis, will help plug the holes and mend the cracks. “That’s really going to help us improve the system over time,” Dunn told the commission. Dunn and his team are in the preplanning phase of cap- ital improvement projects to address water leakage. Mean- while, the commission has approved a water system mas- ter plan, due to the state by 2018, and an iniltration and inlow study. “You’re always going to have some leaks in your sys- tem. Every system has some water leaks, it has some sewer iniltration,” Dunn said. “But, generally speaking, you want to keep it as low as possible.” ODOT: Poor compaction, low density is department’s ‘biggest problem’ Continued from Page 1A “Quality control was not taken seriously,” says Bret Alford, a longtime Depart- ment of Transoportation quali- ty-control specialist who left the agency in 2012. Oregon’s con- tractor-driven oversight system, he adds, “Seems like the fox guarding the hens to me.” ODOT’s oversight sys- tem creates a “huge risk of fraud,” former department inter- nal auditor Mary Hull Cabal- lero, who investigated the state agency’s construction practices extensively, told Secretary of State auditors in 2013, accord- ing to a summary of the audi- tors’ interview. Hull Caballero, who is now the city of Portland’s elected auditor, declined to com- ment for this story. While there are plenty of good contractors out there, “it is so easy for a contractor to fal- sify documentation,” says Carol Putnam, a former ODOT qual- ity assurance specialist who left the department in 2013. “We don’t know what goes on behind closed doors.” In 2014, the Federal High- way Administration communi- cated the results of a top-to-bot- tom review of Oregon’s quality control for road construction conducted the previous year. Its recommendations largely echoed a report it issued in 2005. Rudimentary quality checks Since 2005, federal highway oficials have urged Oregon to pursue electronic data collec- tion of quality test results and to use statistical comparisons to look for anomalies and bogus reporting. Oregon, instead, does not systematically track quality results or use the statistical tests that are common in other states, according to the federal review. Instead of tracking numerous results statistically, a technician will simply compare the state’s result to the contractor’s inding during the spot-check conducted on 10 percent of tests. “This method of veriication is very weak and will only detect severe problems with contractor test results,” according to a 2013 Federal Highway Administra- tion report. Much as it did when the highway administration made the same recommendation in 2005, ODOT has promised to launch a study of the issue. In July, work began on a $300,000 study by a Texas A&M Trans- portation Institute researcher who formerly worked for the pavement industry. Not only is Oregon’s rudi- mentary spot-check method weak and vulnerable to fraud, the state doesn’t do enough spot-checking to determine if it has a problem, according to the feds. In a November 2014 memo requesting funding to study potential quality improvements, ODOT’s top quality assurance engineer, Greg Stellmach, wrote that data gathered that year sug- gested that contractors are not following state transportation rules on random quality testing. That, in turn, can have a “huge impact” on the department’s spending on asphalt, he wrote. Faulty asphalt test Oregon’s roads use asphalt generated by privately owned asphalt plants. Oregon, how- ever, continues to test the asphalt at the plant itself, using a sys- tem that allows the plant oper- ator to know generally when the contractor’s self-test sam- ple is supposed to be taken. That allows the operator to temporar- ily “optimize” the asphalt mix to meet quality standards, accord- ing to the 2014 memo by Stell- mach, the ODOT quality expert. Not only that, but the plant oper- ator has plenty of time to switch to a different mix when it sees a state quality technician drive up to double-check the contractor’s self-test, according to the federal audit. Fraud by asphalt plants is not an abstract concern. Doc- uments show that in 2008, an Department of Transportation pavement engineer resigned in protest and warned the Federal Highway Administration of an “unethical” failure by ODOT management to investigate what he concluded was contractor fraud by an asphalt supplier. Similarly, Alford, the for- mer ODOT quality special- ist, says he heard from a friend who worked for an asphalt con- tractor that there literally was a switch the operator could lip to meet quality standards when the ODOT inspector showed up. Oregon is the only state west of the Rockies to still test at the plant. Most western states test closer to the paving machine as it lays asphalt on the roadbed. ODOT Construction and Materials Engineer Joe Squire says testing the asphalt behind the paver would endanger the employee doing the testing. However, a 2007 University of Illinois survey of state depart- ments of transportation found that “sampling behind the paver is being conducted by many states without much dificulty.” A recipe for potholes Another major issue for ODOT is compaction, mean- ing the use of those giant yellow rollers to get the asphalt to meet the required minimum density. Density tests after compaction are used to determine bonus payments to contractors. A Portland-area ODOT project manager, Ron Larson, explained the issue to state audi- tors in 2013. “The higher the compaction, the longer (the roadway) lasts,” he said, accord- ing to notes of his interview. “Problems in this area are what eventually form potholes.” Poor compaction and low density, he said, is ODOT’s “biggest problem” on projects that go bad. And yet contractors can use rollers to game the den- sity tests, as ODOT oficials have acknowledged. The con- tractors whose rollers are com- pacting the asphalt often know in advance the locations where the density of their product is going to be tested, allowing them to manipulate the system, according to ODOT’s top qual- ity expert. “Frequently the locations that the density shots should be taken at are marked along the pavement at the tonnage where the test needs to be taken,” Stell- mach wrote in the 2014 ODOT document discussing weak- nesses in Oregon’s system. “This allows the roller opera- 20 th A NNUAL A LDERBROOK 0 Picnic Potluck 12 P : M 3 & Violet LaPlante Park Questions? 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Alford, for his part, says he saw a dynamic at ODOT that was focused on getting things done on time as well as exces- sive coziness between contrac- tors and his coworkers, includ- ing project managers. Once, he protested that he would sign only truthful quality reports. A manager responded that Alford would sign whatever report he was told, “or I would be out of a job,” Alford recalls. W A NTED Contact Barbara 503-468-8219 E N L N E T R O L’S K L E C tors to be aware of test locations and potentially inluences the pattern that they make in roll- ing the asphalt. The (contrac- tors’) density technician may also ask the roller operator to do additional compaction in a loca- tion that has not met compaction requirements.” Stellmach, in a telephone interview in which his boss, Joe Squire, and two public rela- tions specialists were listen- ing in, said that he has no evi- dence that gaming the system is a problem. 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