Wakefield City Council looks at sanitary sewer system

WAKEFIELD — AECOM Project Engineer Matt Treado and Principal Engineer Mike Pond addressed the issues and concerns of the sanitary sewer system with the Wakefield City Council members and area residents at the Monday evening council meeting.

According to Pond, on April 28 AECOM received calls of flooding at the main lift station in Wakefield and after some investigating they found the city was receiving flooding into the sanitary sewer system which was impacting the flow of the sanitary sewer to the lift station. Once they were able to identify some of the problems, they were able to resolve those problems within a few hours.

Additional evaluations will be done to come up with solutions to problems that have not been resolved. AECOM hopes to potentially do some “smoke testing.”

“Smoke will seek out the areas of where we have filtration and connection issues, smoke will then come out of those filtration spots and show us where the storm water is entering the sanitary system,” said Treado. Their hope is they will then be able to do some small scale fixes to avoid future problems.

Treado also said they believe there is a major infiltration problem at U.S. 2 and Bedell and they’ll be starting at that location with their evaluations.

Gogebic County Emergency Management Coordinator Jim Loeper advised the council that Governor Snyder requested FEMA for a State Declaration for Gogebic County. Loeper is in the process of completing the damage assessments for this.

“We’re still waiting on some of the numbers to come in, but right now we’re at about $2 million in damages for Gogebic County and approximately $19 million in damages for the state of Michigan,” said Loeper. Of that $2 million, approximately $450,000 is in damages to federal roads and nearly $286,000 is in damages to secondary roads.

Due to Waste Management increasing the rates they charge the city for garbage disposal, the city council approved raising Wakefield resident’s garbage rates from $12.00 per month to $14.00 per month effective June 1, 2013.

The city council also voted to declare the month of May as Mental Health Awareness Month in the city of Wakefield and approved donating the use of the Sunday Lake Pavilion on Wednesday, May 29, 2013, for the Community Mental Health’s “Walk a Mile in my Shoes Rally.”

The next Wakefield City Council meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, May 28, 2013, at 5:30 p.m.