City council reviews $120M plan to modernize Cape Girardeau’s water systems by 2033

The Public Works Department and Alliance Water Resources outlined years worth of improvements needed for the city’s water treatment plant and distribution system to the City Council on Monday, May 6.

The “necessary” changes for the plant and distribution system are scheduled for a timeline from 2024 to 2033 and beyond. The full range of improvements has a projected cost of $120,078,700 with the changes to the plant amounting to $19,951,700.

The improvements to the plant are the only portion of the plan that has any funding to this date. The funded portions include the changing of their lime system and filter system. The current state of their lime system was addressed at a May 6 council meeting where the council approved a new high-density lime system to replace their pebble lime system. The current system only works with two clarifiers, but the new system would run with all three clarifiers at the plant, as well as a proposed fourth clarifier.

Alliance Water Resources local manager Jonathan Ridings said the needed improvements facility stem from three things: changes in their source water, the city’s expansion and their aging infrastructure. He said they still don’t know what has caused the change in the source water, but it slowly started a couple of years ago and has gotten much worse in the last year.

Ridings said the wells they get their source water from have become worse over time.

“There’s four wells down there and they go south to north,” Ridings said. “It’s one by one, those wells are getting worse so something’s moving through the aquifer.”

He said they know some of the characteristics of the water that are changing, but haven’t been able to identify what’s eating all the chlorine up in the water. Ridings also said after they feed the disinfectant, they lose more water than they ever used to.

The water that goes out to the city is disinfected with a bond of ammonia and chlorine to make chloramine. Ridings said if they end up with too much ammonia it can cause nitrites and nitrates, which can be hazardous to infants causing blue baby syndrome. He said they have to use chloramine to treat the water for a large system such as the city of Cape Girardeau because it can travel farther distances and lasts longer.

Ridings assured they don’t let the nitrite levels in the water get too high; it just means they have to drain their tanks more often leaving less water going out to the city. With their planned expansion a installing a fourth secondary settling basin, Ridings said they would help their problem.

“It’s an issue we’ve had but we have wasted a lot of water by having to drain tanks just because once it goes that way, nitrites start going up (and) it’s a waste of water,” he said.

Public Works director Casey Brunke said the water dumped out doesn’t go back into the distribution but is dumped on the ground. According to Ridings, they’re using both a change of polymers and chlorine boosters to address their problems with their source water.

The filter gallery and lime feed system are the two projects that are the furthest along for Public Works, with waiting on a 36-week delivery of the lime system and drawings being worked on for a new 18-inch line running from their sedimentation basin. Ridings said the new line would let water run to the north side instead of just running from the south side.

Ridings described those as the two most urgent projects for them. He said the new lime system will address the quantity and quality of the flow of water, while the filter gallery will address just increased flow. The new changes to the facility would also look to increase their water capacity to gallons per day from 7.5 million to 10.5 million.

Alliance did fix one of the problems with the filter system with a bottleneck pipe where an old part had a 14-inch pipe reduce down to an eight-inch feeding to other eights. Brunke said Alliance put in a 14 by 14-inch piece where it would provide a bigger opening to feed more water into each of the hoses.

Alliance also did fix some scaling issues along some of the pipes that were affected by lime softening causing a pipe to be reduced from a 36-inch pipe to a 12-inch pipe. As well as a carbon dioxide project to help with scaling, filter rehabilitation and a newly designed drain pit.

Their fixes to the distribution systems would focus on improvements to their booster pump stations, high-priority water mains and, later on, other recommended water mains amounting to $89,860,000 as part of the $120,000,000 number listed earlier. None of the distribution system improvements have yet to be funded.

Brunke said the needs for both projects had been identified several years ago, with the filter gallery “starting three or four years ago,” but the funding wasn’t available.

She said that their department currently doesn’t meet the affordability index requirement for the federal grants.