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Three years after sewage disaster, El Paso Water starts last step to rebuild Westside sewer mains [1]

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Date: 2024-12-16

Three years after two ruptured sewer lines forced El Paso Water to divert over a billion gallons of sewage into the Rio Grande, the utility is completing a total replacement of the pressurized mains that ferry wastewater from 94,000 customers to a Westside sewage treatment plant.

Over the last four months of 2021, El Paso Water diverted more than 1.1 billion gallons of sewage into the Rio Grande following the catastrophic failure of both steel Frontera Force mains in August 2021. The utility said the river was the only body of water that could contain the spill to keep wastewater from backing up into streets and homes.

“This pipeline system had completely failed. That’s what led to the discharge into the river,” Gilbert Trejo, El Paso Water’s chief technical officer, told the utility’s board last week. “There was just no way to contain 10 million gallons per day of wastewater from the entirety of the West Side in stormwater ponds.”

Now, El Paso Water is taking the final step to rebuild the Frontera Force main by building a second, redundant line along a path separate from the primary main. The idea is that putting the mains on different paths makes them less likely to rupture at the same time again. And the new mains are made of fiberglass, which is expected to be more durable compared with the steel construction of the original Frontera mains.

Trejo told El Paso Water’s board Wednesday, Dec. 11, that the utility has completely cleaned and remediated the Rio Grande after ceasing the discharge of sewage in January 2022.

“The river is completely restored at this point, with no adverse, lingering factors,” he said.

El Paso Water’s board approved a staff request Dec. 11 to hire contractors to build the secondary sewer main. The utility still has to solicit bids, but the secondary line could cost close to $10 million to build, according to Irazema Rojas, chief engineering officer for El Paso Water.

An image from an El Paso Water presentation shows the route of the Frontera Force Mains. The newly-built, primary main follows the blue and green lines, and the red line marks the original Frontera main path. El Paso Water is building a new, secondary main along the same red path used for the original main. (El Paso Water)

The secondary line will mark the fourth phase in the reconstruction of the five-mile long Frontera pressurized sewer main, which delivers sewage from a lift station near Frontera Road and Doniphan Drive east to the John T. Hickerson Water Reclamation Facility that sits just west of Interstate 10 and Executive Center Boulevard.

El Paso Water brought the sewer line back into service and stopped sending sewage into the Rio Grande in early 2022 after building a new, 6,800-foot segment of the main at a cost of nearly $23 million. El Paso Water finished building a second, mile-long new segment of the pipeline in March 2023 for $33 million.

The utility expects to finish building the last section of the new, primary Frontera Force main in May, at a cost of $52 million. With the secondary line, the total cost for the two newly-built sewer mains could be in the neighborhood of $120 million.

The high cost is the result of complex geology in the area where the sewer mains run; acidic soil in the area as well as gases inside the pipelines helped to corrode the original Frontera Force mains. And to complete the new primary main, El Paso Water is tunneling through bedrock hills into the Hickerson facility, a new route for the utility, Trejo said.

“This is a very complicated, mountainous area,” Trejo said. “We’re coring right through the mountain. … We’re just trying to get to the treatment plant as quickly as we could. The more pipeline we have, the more we have to maintain, the more chance for failure.”

Rojas, the utility’s chief engineer, said she hasn’t seen an El Paso Water project that involves tunneling through rock in at least 25 years.

“This is one of those show-and-tell type of projects that we take the opportunity for our staff to learn from, because we don’t see them often,” Rojas told El Paso Matters. “The whole trajectory and the alignment of this pipeline is situated in very complex soils. We have the clays, we have the bedrock material. So it made this project quite complicated.”

While the utility expects to finish the new, primary Frontera main in May, El Paso Water is trying to expedite construction of the secondary main to complete it in about a year. Once the utility hires two contractors, Rojas said the secondary line could be completed around February 2026.

El Paso Water recently conducted a study examining the nearly 2,500 miles of wastewater pipelines the utility operates in order to grade which lines are most likely to break, and how catastrophic a break in each line would be.

Replacing aging or vulnerable sewage pipes and mains is part of the multi-billion-dollar overhaul of the city’s water and sewer systems that El Paso Water is in the middle of, which is the major driver of the utility’s annual rate increases over the last decade.

“We needed to look into other areas of the city, and look into the areas where we didn’t have that redundancy. And we do have other contracts where we are looking into that, precisely so that we can start addressing them,” Rojas said of vulnerable pipelines. “Customers in El Paso should start getting used to us replacing infrastructure, because there is a lot of need in the community, and we’re going to try to address as much as possible.”

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[1] Url: https://elpasomatters.org/2024/12/16/el-paso-water-frontera-main-sewer-line-replacement/

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