Sewer system woes

More engineering work has been approved for the Wimberley sewer system following concerns that certain areas of the sewer system may not be adequately designed to successfully provide service.

“I arrived at the city on March 29, and I started looking at the wastewater collection system as a whole and trying to catch up,” City Administrator Mike Boese said. “… I pretty much immediately became concerned with what I saw on Blue Hole Lane.”

City Administrator Mike Boese said that the engineer of the system, Plummer Engineering, has proposed the use of multiple grinder pumps at homes on Blue Hole Lane in order to help push the sewage from each home into the main sewer line. Boese stated he is concerned that the pressure in the lines coming from Blue Hole Lane may not be enough to overcome the pressure in the main sewer line.

He asked the council to approve additional engineering work from a different engineer to confirm that the proposed solution would work or to come up with additional options.

“The last thing a city should do is have a system that exists that when residents pay money to connect to it that potentially it might fail,” Boese said. “…I feel like the calculations could be expanded by an additional engineering firm to ensure that the system is going to work if those residents do connect to it.”

Additionally, residents of Blue Heron Run also spoke to the city council about their concerns stating they are paying “exorbitant” prices to hook into the system due to the depth the line was installed at.

“It is the contention of the residents of Blue Heron that the design of the Wimberley wastewater system along Blue Heron failed to consider site conditions, that the taps are too shallow and that the resulting system does not allow for gravity feed connections thus causing unnecessary and exorbitant costs to the residents,” Donn Lamoureux, who lives on Blue Heron Run said.

“The system on Blue Heron Run isn’t an engineering issue,” Boese said. “The depth of the taps they put in was designed for grinder pumps and when you take into consideration that those are in the floodplain, that can cause problems. At this point, it is more of a policy question of what does the city want to do about that.”

Lamoureux asked the council to help get answers on how the decisions were made that resulted in the issues on Blue Heron Run.

The city council added the issue to the agenda of a special meeting that was already scheduled on Thursday this week to hold a discussion on the topic.