By Anne-Marie Lambert
There is good news and bad news in Belmont’s January 31 Report on Compliance to the EPA. On the one hand, the town decided to go ahead and reline or replace many sewer laterals and rehabilitate significant sections of the sewer system in certain Belmont neighborhoods as part of a comprehensive construction project planned for spring 2020. On the other hand, the report indicates that while there was a lot of investigation work (dye testing and sampling) and design work between July 2019 and January 2020, there was no significant mitigation work during the fall construction season.
The deferral of all the actual mitigation work (relining and repair work) to a single $500,000 project in the spring 2020 construction season contrasts with last year’s “fix-as-you-go” approach, leaving sewage dripping into stormwater drains month after month before the project even starts.
The planned comprehensive construction project includes the relining of about 1,776 feet of sewer laterals and the replacement of about 4,376 feet of sewer laterals, as identified in the July 31, 2019, Report on Compliance. It is an impressively large project that also includes significant rehabilitation of the sewer system in the Oliver Road and Knox Street/Bellington Street neighborhoods. In subcatchment Area 8-2 and other areas, the recently relined sewer mainline is above the storm drain mainline, leaving the town’s consultant to conclude that aging sewer service laterals to each house are the likely source of contamination.
It remains frustrating that the town has not found a way to do sampling and construction work in different areas of the town at the same time.
This project is anticipated to go out to bid in mid to late May, and to start in late May. Meanwhile, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the town’s consultant Stantec reports that “limited outdoor fieldwork is still ongoing with sampling and CCTV inspections, but entering houses for plumbing inspections and dyed-water testing is not being conducted due to social distancing.” While the investigative and design work done this winter was impressive, it remains frustrating that the town has not found a way to do sampling and construction work in different areas of the town at the same time.
There are other approaches available to find sewer leaks. Multiple companies now offer robotic inspection services to assess municipal sewer systems’ repair needs. In the past, inspecting a sewer required cleaning the pipes before cameras could be snaked into the sewer to check for cracks. RedZone Robotics in Pennsylvania has multisensor robots that crawl through sewer systems to assess repair needs without prior pipe cleaning. They call it “inspect to clean” and pitch it as a cheaper alternative to the usual “clean to inspect” approach.
A Somerville startup, Biobot, has recently started a pro-bono collaboration with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and researchers at MIT and Harvard to use their sewer-crawling robot sensors to track the COVID-19 virus by analyzing sewage. I’m hopeful that as part of this crisis, innovation eventually results in accelerating the pace of finding high-impact repair needs for cleaning up Belmont’s dirty water.
“Mystery pipes,” such as this PVC pipe, top left, found under the intersection of Orchard and Common Streets, can cause expensive additional work when the town must redirect them from the stormwater drainage system to the sewer system. Photo: Town of Belmont
2020 Belmont Sewer Projects
Plans for the spring 2020 Belmont sewer system rehabilitation project:
Drainage area: action: streets
Wellington 8-2: line all sewer laterals: Shaw, Betts, Livermore Roads
Winn’s Brook 10-2: redirect a direct sewer connection to storm drain: Hoitt Road
Winn’s Brook 10-2: reline sewer laterals : Hoitt Road neighborhood
Wellington 8-6: permanently plug a discovered 6” drain service: Maple Street
Wellington 8-6: reline mainline sewer: Bartlett Avenue
Winn’s Brook 9A: line mainline sewer: Hill Road
Winn’s Brook 11, 11A & 12: reline or replace sewer mainline and service laterals: Oliver Road
Winn’s Brook 15A: line sewer: Knox Street/Bellington Street
Anne-Marie Lambert is a former director of the Belmont Citizens Forum.
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