When Farmington started work on the Yukon Road pump station in mid-May, the job on paper was an electrical one: pull out a wall of variable-frequency drives dating to 2002, some with parts older than that, and replace them with a smaller, more efficient set and a touchscreen panel the original builders never had. Two days in, the crew dug into the wet well and found the part of the job nobody had budgeted for. It was also the answer to a question the authority had left open in April, when Batorski told the board the Yukon station was sitting fully equipped except for one thing: its discharge piping.
"That's probably you got two years left of pumping if you're lucky, and then that would be it," Superintendent Mark Batorski told the Water Pollution Control Authority at its June 9 meeting, describing the hydrogen sulfide corrosion eating through the ductile-iron discharge pipes below the station. "At this point this was like day two of the upgrade. Both us and the contractor were like, we're going to have to do change order. And nobody disagreed."
That is how a contained upgrade becomes a bigger one. The pipe is the same kind of failure that took out a force main on the jug handle back in 2012: hydrogen sulfide builds up in the line and, over years, corrodes ductile iron from the inside until it gives. The crew exposed the three discharge lines, found the couplers, and is replacing the corroded section, roughly 16 feet, from the coupler back to the head of the pipe with what Batorski called high-mass fittings, which give a little more play to move the pipe.
The wet well itself is the other half of the change order. The original plan was to have the town's own crew epoxy the interior. After seeing the condition once it was sandblasted, the authority decided to pay an outside company to line it instead, roughly a quarter-inch thick, with a 10- to 20-year warranty.
"We figured spend $50,000 now because it's $90,000 to bypass," Batorski said. "So if we didn't do the epoxying now and we said, hey, we'll do it next year, we're going to spend $100,000 to bypass before epoxying. So now is the time to do it."
The math, as Batorski laid it out, is the case for doing the unglamorous thing on schedule. The pipe under Yukon Road lasted 20 to 30 years before it started to fail. If the epoxy lining holds for another 20 to 30, he told the board, the station should be good for something close to 50 years. The town is also acting as its own project manager on the Yukon job, contracting directly with the subcontractors rather than bidding the whole thing out. That approach, Batorski said, is saving a substantial amount on a job that would run well over a million dollars as a full station rebuild.
One thing the corrosion did push off the calendar. The Patrick Road flood bypass the authority had hoped to tackle this summer is now headed to summer 2027. With school back in roughly eight weeks, Batorski said, there is not enough time to fit it in without jamming up traffic near Irving and Robin, and Yukon had already turned out to be more than anyone anticipated.
NIC and Flowtech will come out for startup once the outside work and the wet-well lining are done, to verify everything before the station goes back online.
The rest of the report
The corrosion was the headline, but it was not the whole meeting. The plant's May numbers were clean: an average of 3.2 million gallons a day, and the plant again came in under its nitrogen permit, the same streak that has Connecticut writing Farmington a credit check instead of a bill. Curious about an unusually good stretch, staff took an informal sample of the river the outfall empties into and compared it to their own discharge. By their own admission it was a one-time grab sample, taken with the river running low. The treated water tested cleaner: an E. coli reading of about 1 at the outfall against 66 in the river. "You're better off tubing in our outfall than the river," Batorski said, before allowing that the comparison only confirmed what the staff already believed.
The Hyde Road station's PLC and panel upgrade starts this month, adding an ultrasonic transducer as a backup for level control if the main controller fails. Crews spent the month jetting sewer lines across roughly a dozen streets, ran smoke testing in the Meadow Road area as part of ongoing inflow-and-infiltration work, and finished the automated valve pit at the town splash pad, which now diverts to a swale when the pad is closed and to the sewer when it is open, the way the state prefers.
And the plant's recurring mystery is still unsolved. Every couple of years, Batorski told the board, an intermittent slug of something (high pH, high ammonia, high chemical oxygen demand) comes through the system, and the samplers have caught the spikes without ever catching the source. The plan now is to install pH meters at Hyde and Yukon and two more at the head of the plant, to at least narrow down which part of town it is coming from. "I have my suspicions," he said. The meeting adjourned before he had to name them.
This coverage is supported by Farmington Storage, 155 Scott Swamp Road: the only storage facility in Connecticut with Museum air. A pump station corrodes from the inside over 20 years because nothing was holding the conditions steady. Museum air is the opposite proposition, applied to whatever you would rather not lose to time. 860.777.4001 📦
Jack Beckett has covered Farmington's water authority long enough to know that a quiet electrical upgrade is never just an electrical upgrade, and that the most expensive decisions a town makes are the ones happening four feet underground where nobody is looking. He is on his second coffee. The minutes were worth it. ☕
The Farmington Mercury covers the town nobody else is covering: the pump station that turned out to be corroding, the meeting that ran on a Tuesday night while everyone else was at dinner, the line item that determines whether your sewer bill jumps in 2028. We publish slowly, deliberately, and without apology. Our motto is "Always last to breaking news," and we stand behind it: by the time you read this, the dust has settled, the facts are checked, and Jack Beckett has had at least two cups of coffee. Find us at farmingtonmercury.com and tell your neighbors. #WeAreFarmington 📰