Elburn hopes for cheaper fix for sewage plant electrical outages

Elburn city officials are hoping to spend "only" $100,000 or so to keep sewage moving along when storms knock out electricity to the treatment plant, something that happened three times in June.

The alternative is to spend about $539,000.

Storms knocked out power on the overhead line to the plant June 12, 18 and 26, which "severely affected our wastewater treatment operations," said public works director John Nevenhoven. The longest outage was from 3:45 p.m. June 18 to 4:30 a.m. June 19, when a tree fell on the line.

The plant needs electricity to pump raw sewage from a wet well up to the treatment ditches. Without electricity, workers had to connect gasoline- and diesel-fueled generators to those pumps, including a pump borrowed from Geneva. Without those pumps, sewage could back up into buildings.

The village managed to treat sewage well enough despite the outages to avoid violating Illinois Environmental Protection Agency standards, Nevenhoven said. Treated effluent from the plant flows in to Welch Creek.

But the lasting solution is a backup source of power, either from a permanent generator or a secondary, underground feed from a different ComEd substation. The plant used to have such a feed, but it was abandoned. Nevenhoven said he does not know why, because it happened before he was employed by Elburn.

ComEd officials estimated it could be turned back on for about $100,000, he said. The village has not received a formal cost yet from ComEd, however.

The village has applied to Kane County to borrow money through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. It would repay the loan over 10 years, and a portion of the interest would be rebated. It has not heard whether its application is approved. The loan would be repaid from water and sewer bill revenues.