Street by street, workers in Troy, Holland and Bartlett are excavating from narrow graves 4-foot sections of clay sewer pipe, relics from an aging infrastructure that sorely needs modernization.
Almost 50 years of black soil expanding and contracting with the seasons, and tree roots seeking moisture, have taken a toll. Clay pipe, sometimes 15 feet underground, is cracking and buckling. After a heavy rain, runoff seeps into the pipe and flows downhill with the sewage into the treatment facility. Thus, the plant not only has to process everyday waste, it has to treat rainwater that has infiltrated the system. During heavy rains, the treatment facility is literally swamped. This has resulted in toilets that won’t flush.
But there is another problem. The decaying pipe is slowly imploding, returning back to the earth from which it came. Small particles are falling inside and washing into the treatment plant.
“That clay is hard, and it gets into all the pumping systems and it wreaks havoc on it … the chlorinator tank and all the cleaning chambers,” said Koni Billings, Troy city secretary.
On the other side of Bell County, when Mae Smith returned to her hometown of Holland about 12 years ago, she found the city grappling with replacing clay pipes. The struggle continues today.
“We’ve been replacing them for years,” said Ms. Smith, who is now mayor. “It’s something through history you have to deal with.”
Holland utility director Clyde Wallis has a crew replacing old sewer lines. They’ve been digging them up for about two weeks, Wallis said, and will keep at it for about two more months.
“Clay was good 100 years ago,” Wallis said, “but that was back then.”
Williams isn’t joking about the historical use of clay pipes. According to sewerhistory.org, using clay pipes in sewerage systems goes back 6,000 years to ancient Babylon.
Just south of Holland, sitting on the Bell and Williamson County line, the city secretary of Bartlett said they are not exactly sure how far along they are in replacing their clay sewer pipes.
“I don’t know the percentage of new pipes versus old pipes,” Diane Evans said. “A lot of this is trial and error.”
Solutions
At first glance, replacing these old clay pipes may not seem that difficult. Simply dig them up, throw down the new plastic pipe (called PVC), and top the road with a fresh coast of asphalt. Boom, done.
But high oil prices have affected the cost of asphalt and PVC - two commodities paramount to the upgrades - and is straining already tight budgets.
When Troy city secretary Koni Billings moved from Utah 2½ years ago, she immediately sought the advice of Tim Pitts, a contractor who has worked for the city for more than 25 years.
After a crash course in which Ms. Billings made a trip to the sewer plant when it was quickly backing up during heavy rain, she hatched a two-part plan.
First, the city council approved funds to keep some PVC pipe on hand, before the price went up again. Second, she found a grant writer and won $250,000 from the Office of Rural Community Affairs, a state agency backed by federal money.
Then came the reality check.
“You win a quarter million dollars and you think the heavens have opened up and it’s going to solve all your problems,” Ms. Billings said. “And then the reality of that grant is, between engineering and the cost of the operation itself, the pipe, tearing up the road, replacing the road, is incredibly expensive.”
Contractor Pitts said the clay pipe replacement, with new valves, new asphalt and new utility covers, comes to about $250,000 per mile. Troy has replaced about half of the eight miles of sewer line in its grid.
Come September, Troy will apply for another $250,000 ORCA grant. An answer is expected in December.
“It just becomes incredibly draining to replace infrastructure,” Ms. Billings said. “You can’t go in and create a tax burden so great that your public is drained … because you have people who are going to leave your city because the taxes are too high, and you get into that vicious cycle.”
Back in Bartlett, Diane Evans knows all about this “vicious cycle.”
Bartlett has received an ORCA grant in the past and with the help of a grant writer, is applying for another this year. The city has a USDA loan approved and Bartlett is in the final stages of wrapping up the loose ends. Still, it is an ongoing struggle.
“Federal money is getting more and more difficult to get,” Ms. Evans said. “And how are you going to make repairs without raising taxes? Nobody wants to raise taxes. We have a lot of senior citizens and a lot of low incomes.”
Officials in Holland say they can almost see the home stretch. After a decade of work, they are about 75 percent done. City administrator Kathleen Vrana said without these grants, small communities would be at a loss replacing infrastructure.
“Small cities like us don’t have the money,” Ms. Vrana said. “Grants are the only ways to pay for infrastructure. Without that, I don’t think any small community can survive.”
