Town preparing for spring melt

While spring may bring to mind thoughts of milder temperatures, sunshine, and blooming flowers, the Town of Fort Frances is preparing for a less pleasant yet inevitable aspect of it—lots of water.
“Right now, we’re looking at how to run our sanitary sewer in an extreme flooding condition,” Operations and Facilities manager Doug Brown noted Thursday morning.
“[Engineering firm] R.L. Burnside has been retained to do that,” he said. “We’re going to model it first before we do the actual upgrades.
“What happened after the floods of 2002 is we [modelled] the whole sanitary sewer system, but we didn’t model it as to how to operate under an extreme event,” Brown explained.
“Spring is coming up, and one of the things you have to do is shed ‘extremities,’” he said. “You have to determine where to shed; where do you overflow where it doesn’t have much of an environmental impact?
“We are going to try and cross-connect the sanitary to the storm in strategic locations. We’re just starting the modelling process,” noted Brown. “When we tax the system, we don’t want to flood basements anymore.
“We want a plan in place where if we get an event like 2002 or 2000, we can react properly to it.”
Brown said under extreme flood conditions, the town is greatly influenced by rain water going into the sanitary system.
The reason why is because many older homes in town have weeping tile connected to the sanitary sewer system while quite a few newer ones have sump pumps connected to the system for part of the year (winter).
Brown noted residents with sump pumps are encouraged to switch them over to “summer mode” sooner than later.
“March and April are the times when we see the biggest meltdown,” he noted. “We got an inch-and-a-half of snow there on Tuesday and now it’s all gone.
“We’re starting to open up all the catch basins throughout the town to get rid of all the water off the roads. What happens after we’re done ‘steaming’ is people can start putting their storm water back onto the road,” he remarked.
“Some people have their sumps working in their basements all winter, taking away all their weeping tile foundation water.
“It’s time they should switch that pump over and throw it all on the road so we don’t tax the sewage treatment plant,” Brown stressed.
“The flows are starting to pick up because of the spring melt. If they dump it onto their yard, away from their house and onto the road, it goes into the storm sewer system,” he added.
“We don’t treat that, and it saves the town money because we use chemicals and pumping fluid and energy at the sewage treatment plant.
“There’s a savings to the whole community if they switch over sooner.”
Seventy percent of all the fluids that go to the sewage treatment plant are pumped, which requires energy, reasoned Brown, adding the less fluid that goes there, the less cost to the town and, ultimately, the taxpayer.