James Wallace Solves Lift Station Issues

Hot Springs Village Public Services Director Ken Unger said the department has worked on eliminating lift station odor issues. Lift stations are used in HSV to move raw sewage to the sewer treatment facilities. Unger said an employee came up with an idea that has had quite a bit of success. “It is not 100% perfect, but it has made a dramatic difference in some of the really bad areas.”

James Wallace, Supervisor of Lift Stations and Grinder Tanks, “killed two birds with one stone. The surfaces of the fluid at the lift stations are covered with a mat of grease. To prevent this grease formation, a previous solution was to pump air into the tank. This was done to keep the surface moving. While this helped to prevent mat formation, it forced air out of the tank.”

Working innovatively to solve the problem, Wallace built an assembly out of PVC pipe with holes, which he connected to the grinder pump and dropped into the bottom of the wet well. This assembly circulates the water and also sucks in at the same time, so instead of pumping air into the lift station, it creates somewhat of a suction effect inside the tank.

This creative system has dramatically improved lift station odor issues. “It is like the difference between night and day,” expressed the director. Unger plans to deploy more of these assemblies in the upcoming months. “Hopefully, this will result in a lot better environment for people who live around the lift stations.”

“This is pretty exciting! This is one of the issues I have been trying to solve since I took this job. We had had some success doing other things, such as flushing the lines and sealing the lift stations really well. That helped. But the pump solution seems to solve the matting issue and, at the same time, keeps the odors contained pretty well. We are experimenting with pump sizes to see how small we can go, but the total cost will probably be around $1,000 per lift station. To give you a point of reference, we have 55 active lift stations (we bypassed ten), so you are talking $55,000 to fix every lift station if we did it on all of them.” Unger said they will probably bypass one more lift station, so we may only need 54.

In comparison, Unger said when he began the Public Services Director role, one of the solutions to solving the problem was purchasing an ozone generator machine for $34,000. In addition, a building was built around it and placed at Campana. This was only for one lift station and it wouldn’t have worked because the gas was already created. Fixing the majority of the lift stations can be accomplished for the cost of one [unsuccessful] attempt in the past.”

By Cheryl Dowden