Environment, Economy on the Line as Brevard Looks at $65 Million in Sewage Treatment Upgrades
The city's wastewater treatment plant is too small and old to handle expected residential or, especially, industrial growth. The city needs outside help to cover the upgrade costs, officials say.
BREVARD — Aaron Winans opened the door of a fiberglass, Quonset Hut-shaped structure at the city of Brevard’s wastewater treatment plant to reveal the heart of the purification process.
Or, really, its guts.
What happens amid the gurgling brown water and potent, earthy smell is essentially digestion, said Winans, a plant operator.
The cylinders rotating inside the fiberglass housing are coated with bacteria. To them, waste is “food,” Winans said, and their consumption helps process as much as 2.5 millions gallons of sewage per day.
Viewed one way, it’s impressive work for a collection of microscopic bugs.
Viewed another, it’s not nearly enough.
The plant, built in 1987, is too small to handle significant growth in the city — or, long term, to prevent backups contributing to a recently improved but decades-old pattern of sewer-system overflows that have poured hundreds of thousands of gallons of wastewater into the French Broad River.
And though all sewage treatment employs bacteria, the method currently used by the city — rotating biological contactors (RBC) — is considered “archaic,” Winans said. It’s fine for handling residential waste, but can be easily overwhelmed by the growing demands of, for example, the city’s breweries, and is wholly inadequate to support the industrial expansion the city craves.
All of which means that the view of churning wastewater and rust-flecked shafts that turn the microbe-coated cylinders is also a look at the heart of what may be the city’s biggest financial challenge.
Much has been made of Transylvania County’s failure to complete costly school and courthouse projects. But the future of the city’s economy — and, to a lesser extent, the region’s environment — depends on a job carrying a similar price tag: $65 million.
That’s the amount the City Council recently requested from State Rep. Mike Clampitt, R-Bryson City, in the hopes he will seek an earmark for a complete overhaul of the plant in the upcoming state budget.
This ask is a long shot, City Manager Wilson Hooper told the Council at its Jan. 3 meeting, but lays the groundwork for financing work “that is critical for our economic competitiveness.”
“To me, it’s 10 years too late at this point,” Council member Geraldine Dinkins said at the meeting, “but I’m glad . . . we're beginning the process.”
Sewage in the River
The city’s wastewater-treatment operation is actually two operations falling under two separate state permits — first the treatment plant on Wilson Road near the French Broad, and second, the pipes and pumping stations that feed it.
“Their job is to get it to me and my job is to polish it up and send it back out to the stream,” said Emory Owen, the plant’s operator-in-charge.
In recent years it’s this collection system that has received the most attention from Council and state regulators — with good reason.
The combination of Brevard’s heavy rains and ancient sewer lines — some of them roughly a century old — have led to hundreds of sanitary sewer overflows (SSOs) in the past 20 years, according to a spreadsheet provided by the state Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ).
Old lines are often cracked lines, resulting in what people in the treatment industry call “inflow and infiltration” — runoff entering sanitary rather than storm sewers.
The collection system is assumed to be one of several causes of elevated levels of E coli bacteria in the French Broad posted on MountainTrue’s Swim Guide. But the environmental organization has found similar levels of contamination both upstream and downstream from Brevard, and more advanced testing is required to determine how much of the pollution comes from city sewer lines, said French Broad Riverkeeper Hartwell Carson.
Though the existence of the overflow problem is well known, the extent of it, maybe, is not.
DEQ has documented 276 SSOs in just the past decade (see graph), and since 2010 such overflows have resulted in $117,383 worth of fines. That figure comes from a draft of a soon-to-be finalized agreement with DEQ that calls for the department to hold off on levying fines if the city commits to investing in improvements to its collection system.
The terms are similar to an earlier agreement with DEQ, in place from 2012 to 2014, and Brevard has been working on those upgrades for years, according to a May 2021 presentation to Council from former Public Works Director David Lutz.
He provided Council with a list of $23.6 million in improvements to the city’s sewer and water system paid for with the help of a DEQ fund that provides grants and low-interest loans for that purpose.
The biggest project included both a replacement of the city’s pumping station on Neely Road and the construction of a 3.2-million gallon storage tank at the treatment plant.
The total cost of this work was about $13.7 million, but, Lutz told Council, that tank had stored a cumulative total of 195 million gallons of untreated wastewater and saved the city as much as $3.9 million in DEQ fines since its completion in late 2017.
The Council approved another job at that meeting, a $2.3 million upgrade of lines and pumps near Gallimore Road funded with the help of a $500,000 grant and a larger no-interest loan from DEQ.
The city has made “critical investments . . . to maintain and upgrade its wastewater collection and treatment system,” Tim Heim, an environmental engineer with DEQ’s Division of Water Resources office in Asheville said last week. “We are now seeing results in Brevard’s operational ability and a dramatic reduction in the frequency and severity of sewer overflows.”
Work on the Gallimore Road project began in December of 2021, and is now complete except for some “punch list items,” Hooper said this week.
But even after those pipes had started to accept flow, on Dec. 15, the city reported an overflow of 6,500 gallons, Hooper said. The Gallimore Road job is the last major project listed in the draft agreement with DEQ, said acting Public Works Director Wesley Shook, and when it is fully online he is “90 percent confident” it will correct the problem of chronic SSOs.
But with lines as old as Brevard’s, his department must continue to make smaller repairs, he said, and “there is a chance with a heavy storm that the system could overflow.”
A Little History
The plant faced its own crisis starting in late 2012, after the opening of the Oskar Blues Brewery, according to a 2014 report from engineering firm CDM Smith Inc.
The issue was not so much the volume of wastewater the beer maker produced, but the concentration of organic material in its waste, measured by the amount of oxygen required to process it, or the “biochemical oxygen demand” (BOD).
CDM presented a plan to scrap the RBC system and install new equipment better able to handle industrial waste and carrying an estimated price of nearly $9 million.
On Sept. 15, 2014, according to meeting minutes, City Council voted to apply for a low-interest loan from the state in that amount, an action strongly backed by former City Manager Joe Moore.
But the city was also considering other expensive projects at the time — including a downtown parking deck and the future expansion of its water plant. At a Council retreat in January of 2015, there was talk of taking on as much as $50 million in debt and, to help make payments on it, a potential 37.5 percent increase in utility bills, according to the Transylvania Times.
Because of these costs, longtime Council members Mac Morrow and Maurice Jones pushed back on the plan to replace the RBC cylinders. And by late 2015, Moore had resigned, the Council had voted to cancel its loan application, and the city was committed to finding cheaper solutions to upgrade its plant.
These included replacing shafts that drive the eight RBC cylinders, Owen said, adding that even then the method was so outdated he could only find only salvaged — not new — parts for this purpose.
The plant also added another step, introducing chemicals to aid its treatment of concentrated waste. And, after reaching an agreement with the city, Oskar Blues spent about $1.5 million to build a system to partly treat its effluent on site, said Aaron Baker, a City Council member and senior marketing director for the brewery. This system also includes storage tanks that allow the company’s wastewater to cool and be delivered in a steady stream rather than in surges.
“They just send us a little at a time, which really helps us a lot,” Owen said of Oskar Blues.
Jones and Morrow stand by their decision, with Morrow saying CDM’s plan would not have increased capacity while creating a crippling burden on utility customers.
“We couldn’t afford it,” he said.
But Baker, who was elected in 2021, said that in comparison to the current bill for improving the plant, the actions saved the city a “paltry sum.”
“We should have done it when the engineering firm and the city manager were recommending it,” he said.
More and “Dirtier” Wastewater
In some ways, those Council decisions from last decade have been vindicated. Along with the installation of the 3.2 million-gallon storage tank, which helps prevent the plant from being overwhelmed during heavy rains, the less-costly upgrades have allowed the facility — unlike the collection system — to avoid any recent DEQ violations.
The plant is also running at 75 percent of its 2.5 million-gallon-per-day capacity, meaning it could potentially handle an additional daily flow of more than a half-million gallons.
But if the need for improvements and expansion are not yet urgent, they are looming ominously for reasons Winans explained during last week’s tour.
Though the collection system and the plant are often talked of as separate systems, their problems are related, Winans said. As flows surge beyond the facility’s capacity, it can create backups that lead to more overflows in the pipes and pumps.
“If you could put more through your plant, you could reduce your SSOs,” Winans said.
Also, that 75 percent figure is an annual average, he said. Rainstorms regularly produce far more than that amount and more, even, than the volume the plant is designed to process, which happened as recently as last week.
Growth in the city cut the facility’s remaining capacity by 11 percent in the past decade, according to flow data in CDM’s 2014 study. And faster growth and, with it, more demand for treatment is on the way, based on a recent report about soaring building activity in Transylvania and a list of anticipated projects that Winans had prepared for a report to the state.
The 60-unit Fairhaven Meadows affordable housing complex as well as several smaller developments will produce an estimated 40,000 gallons of additional sewage, his calculations showed. He also mentioned the prospect of even bigger future customers such as a planned new county courthouse, and, further down the line, a potentially massive development on the long-dormant 525-acre site of the former Ecusta Mill paper factory.
The crucial capacity number is not 100 percent, he added, but a figure the plant is rapidly approaching, 80 percent. At that point the state regulators require plant operators “to be working with engineers on plant design,” Winans said. “When you get to 90 percent, they are expecting you to break ground.”
Adding to the city’s challenge, it especially wants to build on its success in attracting breweries and drug manufacturers, which, as Oskar Blues has demonstrated, place far greater demands on treatment facilities than do residences.
“For lack of a better word,” Hooper told Council on Jan. 3, such industries produce “dirtier wastewater.”
A Bigger Plant and “Busier” Bugs
Cleaning sewage from all sources is a multi-step process, Winans said during his tour.
It first flows over a series of aluminum screens that filter out grit and other non-soluble items. These have included “worms and crawdads and parts of fish,” Winans said, listing the debris that tipped him off to a leak in a since-repaired line that had been admitting the contents of a nearby creek.
“I was thinking, this is crazy.”
All such waste is scraped from the screens by hand and trucked to the county landfill. The next step, the removal of organic waste, is performed by the rotating, bacteria-coated cylinders.
The discharge then flows to open, circular “clarifying” tanks where the remaining sludge is scraped from the surface and allowed to settle.
The result is effluent clear enough to be recognized as water. It is disinfected with chlorine and then treated to neutralize that additive before flowing into the French Broad.
The cost of the upgraded facility and its potential design are, at this point, merely rough projections based on the 2014 CDM study, Hooper said.
But even if the $65 million figure is little more than an educated guess, the cost would create an unacceptable burden on utility customers, he said, and can be covered only with the help of the state or another outside funding source.
And even CDM’s basic plans show how inadequate the plant is now, how much work must be done to meet the city’s future needs.
Its capacity should double, to 5 million gallons per day, according to an email that CDM recently sent to the city. The grit filtration and chlorination systems would be expanded and the hulking RBC cylinders replaced by a “diffused aeration” system — likely a series of open tanks that allow the bacteria to be fed with air bubbles.
“What (this process) does is agitate the air and allow the bacteria grow and thrive,” Owen said. “They work harder . . . they’re a lot busier.”
The new plant would also need additional clarifying tanks, the CDM email said, and the “only infrastructure that is getting reused is the two existing clarifiers . . . Everything else would generally be new.”
Email: brevardnewsbeat@gmail.com
Editor’s Note: Calling all global warming refugees. Realtors I recently talked to said that many of their out-of-town customers are fleeing areas facing dramatic impacts of climate change, including floods, hurricanes and forest fires. If any readers fit this description, feel free to reach out at the above email address. I’d love to hear your stories. Thank you!
In your research did you come across anyone mentioning composting wastewater? I read that some municipalities do this.
Joe Moore was fired because he was pushing for a new Wastewater plant/ upgrades and the Council though his ideas were unacceptable. The retelling of the tales is off a bit. :)