If you live here, this will come as no surprise: Hampton Roads is really flat. It’s life at sea level, and the combination of past construction on wetlands, rising sea level and sinking ground (called relative sea level rise) has turned southeastern Virginia into a poster-child for sea level rise impacts. Hampton Roads is rated second only to New Orleans as the area most vulnerable to relative sea level rise in the United States. All eyes are on us and it’s got everyone talking “resiliency.” How do we prepare? How do we adapt? One way HRSD is taking action is through SWIFT, an initiative to replenish the aquifer with purified water in an effort to stop the ground from sinking.
But we’ve been living the low-lying life here for . . . well, forever. And some things we had to learn a long time ago. For example, when you live sans elevation, you can’t rely on gravity to move water for you. It can’t flow downhill without a hill, so you’ve got to move it. Wastewater from homes and businesses needs to be moved to a wastewater treatment plant and cleaned, so we’ve got to pump it there. We do this with pump stations, and HRSD has over 100 of them.
These pump stations need to be maintained and they need to meet the needs of the population pumping to them, or else sewage spills out into the environment. More people = more flushes = more wastewater flowing through the pipes. Today, HRSD is 60% of the way through a project to replace a pump station in Hampton that is past its useful life in terms of age and capacity. This pump station is over 70 years old! The new Bridge Street Pump Station incorporates the latest technology and will be able to handle the flushes, showers and dishwashing of a growing population in downtown Hampton. Without this investment in infrastructure, wastewater overflows would occur, spilling dirty water into our waterways.
But this is not your run-of-the-mill pump station. As HRSD’s General Manager, Ted Henifin, always says, “We reserve the right to be smarter tomorrow.” The new $12.4 million Bridge Street Pump Station is designed to pump up to 16.6 million gallons of wastewater per day and will be resistant to tidal flooding as well as the effects of long-term relative sea level rise. It’s also designed to look like a house and blend naturally with the surrounding neighborhood. Here’s what will lie beneath that homey-looking exterior:
- Walls that go down more than 30 feet into the ground.
- 5 pumps at the bottom of the pump station: two 75-horsepower pumps and three 300-horsepower pumps.
- Pipes that range from eight to 48 inches in diameter.
- 2,700 cubic yards of concrete, grout and fill (to date).
- 14 concrete walls, each of them three-feet thick.
Designing for the future is not cheap, but our local economy is benefiting before this project is even complete. There is a wide range of contractors involved: heavy equipment operators, pipe layers, electricians, plumbers, etc. The number of man hours between HRSD and the local engineering experts and local construction staff hired for this project, still with 10 months to go, is impressive. To date, this project has required approximately 1,400 man hours from HRSD, with HDR completing over 11,000 man hours and MEB General Contractors reaching almost 13,000 man hours. That’s TENS OF THOUSANDS of man hours for this one project in less than three years. HDR’s Inspector is also estimated to have downed 750 cups of coffee in order to keep pace with all this work, so the local economic impact from coffee consumption alone is surely noteworthy.
The Bridge Street Pump Station project and HRSD’s VIP project both take a proactive approach to address aging infrastructure. When completed, these projects will improve HRSD’s ability to handle more frequent peak flows as a result of sea level rise. Check out HRSD’s Time To Build Video to learn more about these efforts to invest in infrastructure, build our community, and grow our economy.