The city of Durango announced last week that it is seeking a contractor to repair about 300 feet of deteriorated concrete wall at the Santa Rita Water Reclamation Facility.
The deterioration being addressed is part of the facility’s original structure, built in the 1980s, and is not part of the $58.3 million upgrades the city finished in 2019.
“The deterioration is in an area that is generally called our final clarifiers. So those tanks have existed since the 1980s and held water,” said Jarrod Biggs, assistant director of utilities with the city of Durango.
Bidding instructions for contractors for a leak mitigation project were sent out Aug. 17.
About 300 feet of concrete walls between the wastewater plant’s treatment complex basement and the secondary clarifiers need to be repaired.
Biggs said the exterior of the wall has undergone a rehab project, but when the secondary clarifiers were returned to service, a concerning amount of water was getting through.
“We consulted with our concrete engineers, and they said, ‘We see this happen sometimes,’” Biggs said. “Once you do some rehab, the water will just find its way into cracks that previously existed.”
A budget of $65,000 has been set aside to do the necessary rehab work on the concrete. However, Biggs hopes the cost will be much lower. The cost depends on how much treatment to the wall is needed.
“We’ve done similar projects on similar walls, and it really just depends. They have to drill into the wall and inject epoxy, and let that cure so you can refill it with water to make sure it worked,” Biggs said. “It’s our hope that it’ll be a simple one and done, but if it’s necessary we might have to do secondary or even tertiary treatment.”
Biggs estimated each epoxy treatment might cost about $20,000.
As far as the time frame, the city hopes to find a contractor for the project by October and be finished with the rehab by the new year.
“The nice thing about it is it’s an interior basement, so even if the weather gets bad, they should be able to do this work,” Biggs said.
Residents need not be concerned about service interruptions from the wastewater facility, Biggs said.
“The beauty of the plant we built is that we do have redundancy,” Biggs said. “So in this case, we can rehab the old clarifiers, and leave the new ones working.”
njohnson@durangoherald.com
