A little less than three years ago, the Franklin Township Municipal Sanitation Authority delivered a model to state environmental officials flow mapping of sewage through its 330-mile system.

It was among the mandated goals in a 2019 consent order entered into by FTMSA, as well as its customer communities, with the overall goal of addressing runoff and infiltration — stormwater entering sewer lines.

Stormwater in the system is essentially a waste of FTMSA’s resources—it’s filtered through the soil and doesn’t need to be treated—and to date, efforts to clean it out of the system have resulted in about 4 million fewer gallons entering the plant during storms. of rain, according to authority manager Nicholas Kerr.

“In the past, whenever it rained, we experienced about 20 million gallons of flow at the plant,” Kerr said.

In 2020, the average daily flow rate at the plant was approximately 3.7 million gallons; today, it’s 2.5 million, a discount of about 35%.

Following the various goals set out in the consent order, FTMSA’s board and manager – who today are quite different from the group that entered the order – have just a few more marks to hit before they meet all of their demands.

“We started by identifying very bad areas, in some cases whole neighborhoods, that were on the old package plants installed before the FTMSA was built in 1969,” Kerr said. “They were put in by developers in the ’50s and ’60s, and there just weren’t a lot of inspections when those homes were built.”

These Murrysville neighborhoods included Rustic Ridge, Pheasant Run, Mystic Hills, Bel Aire and Surrey Farms.

“Our assessment showed that the influx was really excessive in those places,” Kerr said. “So instead of putting a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound, we did a total replacement.”

Those repairs were made to infrastructure determined to have what the National Association of Sewerage Companies calls Grade 4 and 5 defects.

“One and two are maybe a little bit of a crack,” said FTMSA Chief Operating Officer Bob Swarmer III. “Four and five are large cracks with dripping or overflowing water, or a pipe that is about to collapse.”

FTMSA has repaired all such defects in the pipeline it owns and recently signed agreements with Salem and Export to do the same. In addition, Kerr said Monroeville officials have agreed to turn over a small section of their sewer infrastructure that includes portions of the Asbury Park and Shangri-La neighborhoods.

“They chose to turn it over to us, and we’re going to put it on our to-do list,” Kerr said.

Some other work that still needs to be done includes straightening some areas where the sewer pipes make a sharp turn of more than 90 degrees.

“If you have a kink like that, the flow starts to turn around and you start all over again to try to get that flow speed again,” Kerr said. “Our Haymaker interceptor, for example, behind Giant Plumbing on Sardis Road, has areas with bends greater than 90 degrees where the water stops and restarts. We intend to run two sections next year and that should make a big difference.”

Anaerobic to aerobic

Kerr said FTMSA also plans to change wastewater processing from anaerobic (without oxygen) to aerobic. The facility currently uses a massive, egg-shaped digester to treat sewage sludge.

“We did a cost analysis, and the problem with the egg, in my opinion, is that the heat level for a lot of its parts is 160 degrees, and beyond that you need parts that are a bit more expensive,” he said. he said. said.

The original idea for the digester was that FTMSA could create treated sludge and sell it as fertilizer.

“The market for it just didn’t work out the way we hoped,” Kerr said.

The egg-shaped digester, an anaerobic system, cost more than $11.5 million to purchase and install in the early 2000s. The EnviroMix system which will break down and treat the sludge using an aerobic process costs $2.5 million. The authority secured a 20-year loan for the total $7.5 million cost of the conversion project.

“In addition, the byproduct from the egg is methane and hydrogen sulfide,” Kerr said. “The byproduct from the aerobic system will simply be carbon dioxide.”