Treatment plant begins phase one construction in August

Dryden is expected to see the groundbreaking of the new Sewage Treatment plant located on the current Marguerite Street site in early August.

With Penn-Co, the chosen contractor, being accepted at the July 19 City Council meeting, the excavation and foundation should be completed by the end of September.

“We’re expecting that right after the long weekend in August, the contractor will be onsite and removing 35,000 cubic metres of dirt,” reports Mike Louttit, Director of Engineering and Public Works for the City of Dryden.

With funding received from the Building Canada Fund, the cost will be just shy of $30 million for the total project.

The contract will be awarded in September to complete the second phase of the project, which will be the general contracting and construction of the new building on the foundation. Predictions are for late 2011 to have the new plant operational.

With the current facility being built in the 1960s, it needs to be replaced due to deterioration and the facility falling apart. Secondly, the size of the current facility is not sufficient to support the growing community.

Due to the size limitations on the current facility, the City has had issues currently and in the past obtaining Certificates of Approval from the Ontario Ministry of Environment for new projects, such as the Norwill Subdivision.

The new sewage treatment plant will be the first of its kind in North America that will be Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified.

“LEED is a process that certifies that you have done what you have said you were going to do with respect to environmental and energy design,” says Louttit.

You pay a fee to be part of the program, followed by a process of consultants collecting information, a commissioning resource, the contractor executing the project in a certain manner followed by the accumulation of checkpoints on a score card.

Depending on the amount of checkpoints you successfully accumulate, there are different levels of certification. The first is basic certification, followed by silver, then gold, then platinum. The City is looking towards the silver certification.

By Ally Dunham

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