Jeff Moore, with Bartlett & West, said on July 21 that since Bourbon was awarded over $700,000 from the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program to address the emergency sewer situation under Interstate 44, he should update the board on what to expect next.

During the June 16 meeting, Mayor Sky Huddleston said a sewage pipe beneath Interstate 44 had collapsed.

“This has caused raw sewage to leak into the soil under the interstate, which will obviously contaminate the surrounding environment and eventually the groundwater,” Huddleston said.

Moore assured the board that, even though the project is being funded by a different grant source, he has spoken with the Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and the city doesn’t need to resubmit any construction applications.

In order to move into bidding the project out, the CDBG requires that the city contact property owners and record easements.

Before the Jost and Siebenman streets’ State Revolving Fund (SRF) projects are put out for bid, they need to record some more temporary easements.

“I spoke with Cathy (Bremer, now former city clerk) recently. She said that she’s going to have the information over to DNR relatively soon, and they should be able to finish up the user rate analysis and determine whether or not you need to pass an ordinance to support the loan,” Moore said.

As for the rest of the city’s sewage system, Huddleston announced that old records were found and will be used to assess what needs to be done to help the city’s infrastructure.

“Approximately 70-80-ish percent of our sewage pipe that we’ve mapped out thus far is made out of vitrified clay. The clay has cracked. It has fallen apart,” Huddleston said. “A lot of this vitrified clay pipe was put in before World War II. Very old. The roots are destroying it.”

This is leading to excessive rainwater entering the sewage system, and causing residents’ basements to flood and streets to back up.

Moore added that just fixing the infiltration and inflow (I&I), which is excessive water flowing into the sanitary sewer system, will not solve the whole problem. It would depend on the severity of the damage if options like cured-in-place piping would be effective.

Another problem was found when a hydraulic analysis was done on the pipe under Interstate 44.

“One thing that we found while we’ve been doing this project is one of the clarifiers at your plant, there’s a splitter box, and when water comes in, the normal flow, it goes over the oxidation ditch, where it runs through the treatment process. And during storm events, when you have all this inflow and infiltration, there’s a weir inside that splitter box that directs that excess flow to a secondary clarifier that is effectively being used as a storage tank,” Moore said. “Well, the issue with that is from there it just goes right out to the creek. It doesn’t get rerouted back into the treatment process. And even before large storm events, your wastewater treatment plant is pretty much running at max already.”

To help combat the problem, the aldermen and Moore have discussed constructing an earthen basin adjacent to the existing treatment plant to store all the inflow coming into the system and pump it over to the treatment system at a later time at a rate that it could handle.

“Our opinion is that would be the most effective way to address all the excess flow coming in because fixing every single pipe just doesn’t have the impact that we think it would,” Moore said.