Mount Olive Town Manager Jamie Royall reviews some of the plans for improvements to the town’s wastewater treatment plant and its water and sewer lines|(Steve Herring/mountolivetribune.com)
It could be another three to four years before the town of Mount Olive is finally able to resolve its nearly 50-year-old struggle to fix a troubled sewer system that has stalled its growth.
Meanwhile, the town remains under a state-mandated moratorium that prevents the addition of new sewer hookups.
“You know at least once a month, I’ve got somebody wanting to come and build something in Mount Olive — restaurants, different businesses,” Town Manager Jammie Royall attested during a recent interview.
The town cannot tell them yes because of the moratorium, and the state monitors what goes on in town, he said.
“We are trying to do what we need to and get out from under the moratorium,” Royall stressed.
The troubled sewer system has cost the town thousands of dollars in state fines over the years because of massive overflows — some exceeding 300,000 gallons — that sometimes spill over into the headwaters of the Northeast Cape Fear River.
However, the problem is more complex than a wastewater treatment plant that has failed to live up to its promised performance when it was built in 2007.
The other major contributing factor, one not readily seen by the public, is the miles of underground sewer lines — some more than 100 years old and made of terracotta — that allow rainwater and groundwater into the sewer system.
Known as inflow and infiltration, or I&I, once the water enters the sewer system it has to be treated, placing an added burden on an already strained system — particularity when heavy rains overpower the plant’s treatment capacity.
It also adds to the cost of treatment.
As such, the town has two problems to solve, both of which will take time, Royall said.
It must get the wastewater treatment plant up to standards and replace the crumbling underground pipes to stem I&I, he pointed out.
The problems have been made worse by damage caused by hurricanes Matthew (October 2016) and Florence (September 2018).
COVID hampered the process as well. Also at issue is the increase in construction costs.
In the fall of 2019, the town received $5.5 million in state disaster relief funds to help repair and upgrade its wastewater treatment facility.
“Like I said back in 2019 we were awarded $5.5 million,” Royall said. “And it takes a little while for grants to get in and get to us to get started with them.
“By the time it actually got in, COVID had hit. So with the rise in price of everything, five and a half million turned into about three and a half million. It pushed us back on a lot of stuff that we wanted to do.”
Work so far has included harvesting the trees that had been watered through a drip-irrigation system used to apply treated wastewater.
The trees were replaced by a planting of Coastal Bermuda Grass on a spray field where the treated wastewater is applied. The process is expected to work better than the drip-line method.
The town was able to harvest some of the grass this past summer, Royall said.
“A lot of people say, ‘You can make money off of the hay,’” he said. “Our object is not to make money — we have got to get rid of the water and we can only put so much in the creek.
“This is what we need to get rid of water, and we break about even because we have a farmer coming in now who helps because we don’t have the equipment yet. So we are on that project and we have in the last couple of months just began because that was a two-part project.
The other part is work inside the wastewater treatment plant. That work has started, he said.
The town also has received a $15 million state grant for improvements to the system. The grant was written so that $6 million would be used on the wastewater treatment plant and $9 million to address the I&I problem.
“You know, a lot of people don’t really think of it (I&I),” Royall said. “They just think of the treatment plant, but the I&I problem is just so bad. It sends water that shouldn’t be there to start with.
“We’ve got everything going there (treatment plant) so that’s what makes the treatment plan look like we’ve got such a problem we have with it.”
It is difficult to say how much I&I water enters the system annually, he said.
The system is not currently at capacity because of the recent dry weather, the town manager pointed out.
But when there is a large rain event, the plant is way over capacity, he said.
“It is enough that the state has come in, and this was back in 2015 when we were placed on this moratorium, and said, ‘Hey, you’ve got to get your collection system in order,” Royall said.
Royall said he recently was reviewing paperwork from the $15 million grant application when he saw that some of the pipes have been underground since 1914.
The work at the plant should be finished around March or April of 2023, he said.
The I&I project still needs to be engineered and construction probably will not start until September 2023 with a completion date of late 2025 or early 2026.
“So like I said, it does not move as fast as everyone thinks it does or that they would like it to,” Royall said.
