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The Altoona Water Authority expects to start $30.8 million worth of work at the Bellwood reservoir in October or November, after years of delays.
Consulting engineer Gwin Dobson & Foreman is updating specifications and plans for the $20.9 million renovation of the dam and the $9.9 million renovation of the water treatment plant and has tentatively set up bid advertisements in July for the dam and in August for the plant, company President Mark Glenn told the board Thursday.
The authority will pay for the projects with $30.9 million that Pennvest awarded in January, several weeks after the Department of Environmental Protection had issued a permit for the dam and five months after it had issued a permit for the plant.
DEP pushed the authority to do the dam renovation several years ago because the emergency spillway of the dam is dangerously undersized.
In September 2014, the authority began setting up a schedule, which initially called for construction to begin as early as late 2017.
A variety of factors led to delays, which included a backlog caused by turnover at the DEP, the complex design of the dam project and issues that DEP identified with the plan, according to prior information provided by Gwin Dobson and a DEP spokesman.
The authority is renovating the plant at the same time as the dam because the plant is approaching the end of its useful lifespan and because the plant would have been shut down anyway with the reservoir empty.
Workers will replace the existing sand filtration system in the plant with an innovative membrane filtration system, which screens out contaminants to the sub-micron level.
The dam work will take two years and the plant work a year and a half, Glenn said Thursday.
The authority will replace the obsolete ozonation disinfection system at the Tipton water treatment plant to the north of Bellwood before beginning the Bellwood projects to ensure there is sufficient capacity when Bellwood is offline.
The ozonation project is on schedule, with the arrival of some of the necessary equipment recently from Germany and with arrangements made for the leasing of liquid oxygen tanks, staff engineer Michael Sinisi told the board Thursday.
The authority could probably handle the shortfall that will be caused by the Bellwood shutdown with facilities to the south of the borough, but having the upgrade completed at Tipton will provide assurance, said General Manager Mark Perry.
The authority has been having discussions with Bellwood Borough about the borough's cost sharing responsibility for debt service on the dam and plant projects, Perry said.
In 2016, the authority granted the borough's request to reduce the borough's share of the reservoir water allocation from 800,000 gallons a day to 350,000 gallons -- or 16% to 7%, which will mean the borough will pay less than it would have otherwise on debt service for the projects, authority officials said then.
It will be important to receive "good bids" for the Bellwood projects, according to Glenn.
But there are concerns about rising construction costs, due to "pent up demand" because of work deferred due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
Mirror Staff Writer William Kibler is at 814-949-7038.