Let ‘em spray

Several years ago, the State of North Carolina took a hard stance against smaller towns maintaining their own sewer treatment facilities. The roots of that were the recurring problems plants were having with spills.
In their wisdom, state officials endorsed regional waste treatment facilities. Rather than individual towns, often with stretched staffs and under-funded maintenance, cities would act as processors for a number of communities.
Fremont and Eureka have had little choice but to tap into Goldsboro’s system.
Goldsboro has been a reluctant party to all of this. They have been concerned about maintaining sewer capacity to sell to new industry and for housing growth. They are also facing increasingly tougher standards to meet for the quality of the discharge they put back in the nutrient sensitive Neuse River.
The original problems with the towns’ sewer systems came from problems with infiltration and inflow. It was rather like insulating a house. Builders knew a hundred years ago that houses wouldn’t hold heating and cooling because they didn’t have insulation, but with energy costs what they were then, it didn’t make dollars and cents to spend the extra money for insulation.
Similarly, our sewer systems were designed to take our waste to facilities rather than depend on septic tanks. They weren’t designed to make sure ground water and rainwater stayed out of them. The cost of treating the waste was not significant.
Ask anyone who has paid a $100 sewer bill. There are plenty of those around. Times have changed!
In Fremont’s case, they not only weren’t designed to keep out infiltration and inflow, they weren’t designed for easy replacement when they broke or got cracked, as terra cotta pipe is very prone to do. I remember well the 15-foot hole in front of my house that opened up one day, as dirt from the 14 1/2 foot above the sewer line had washed away into the line, causing the street to collapse.
While not all the line in town is that deep, just think of the extra expense to dig up and replace sewer line that deep in the ground.
Fremont has been paying and paying. The state has been helping and helping with grants and loans, but literally millions of dollars has been going to contractors to fix Fremont’s leaking lines. The town is not out of the woods yet.
Eureka’s problems are very different, though similar. It wasn’t seventy years ago when Eureka put in sewer, more like twenty or thirty. It was suppose to be done so much better, as we knew better what we were doing in putting in sewer lines, but Eureka apparently has very significant infiltration and inflow problems as well.
A small town with few resources, no industry, and many who are not that far above the poverty line, town leaders have had no easy answers to how to pay the mounting bills. More than a few have suggested that the right answer would be for the incorporated town to disappear and let the county or someone else deal with the sewer situation. The state will have none of that.
As we have stated previously, we appreciate the work of our state legislators, and particularly State Senator John Kerr, in helping our towns deal with a difficult, some would say impossible, problem.
From our local perspective, Goldsboro has been a part of the problem, as they continue to increase their sewer rates. Adding to our financial strains, we have a hard enough time finding the money to pay for repairs, we have to pay more and more for the waste and the rainwater we are putting in the system.
Goldsboro officials will tell you they would be happy for the towns to find their own solutions to their problems and not eat up their capacity. They are just trying to provide for their citizens and the potential for growth.
A great at least short-term solution for both towns will be to allow the two to open spray fields. While much of the waste will still be going to Goldsboro, during the continuing high rainwater infiltration and inflow times that excess can be sent to lagoons to apply to hay fields.
This marks a change in the state’s stance. We need to make sure this works for all parties, including the state who has been burned by small towns who didn’t operate and maintain facilities like they should.