Ground breaks on new Mt. Pleasant water well

Mt. Pleasant Utilities has broken ground on a new water well located on the corner of East Cedar Lane and North Hamlin Street.

The new well is part of a 25-year infrastructure plan alongside the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The plan is to provide a clean water source to customers and do it efficiently.

This is not a new project, Mt. Pleasant Utilities Manager Jack Hedgecock said.

"This project has been underway for a number of years now," Hedgecock said." We bought the property roughly five years ago. "We worked with the city on a collaborative agreement where we bought eight acres on site."

The well-building process itself is roughly a $3 million project.

This project is like a puzzle. Numerous parts need to be put in place before moving to the next. This led utilities to break the plans into three separate packages.

"Normally, what a city or utilities will do is hire a general contractor and do the whole thing right," Hedgecock said. "The trouble is the guy that pours the cement is not the guy who drills the hole in the ground 2,000 feet, and he's not the guy that puts the pipe in the street and brings it back here. So what they do is mark it up 20 percent. We can't have that for our customers, and they can't afford it. So we broke it up into three components."

Package 1 is considered the well drilling process. The expected completion cost is $1.8 million.

This package includes the drilling and placement of the pump. Cahoy Pump Service, out of Sumner, Iowa, will oversee this package's completion.

The projected depth of drilling is somewhere between the range of 1,900 to 2,000 feet. The opening drill hole will be 30 inches.

The target for water being pumped from the well is 2,000 gallons a minute. The hope is to use the new plant as a backup to the Oakland Mills treatment plant.

The expectation is for Project 1 to be done by February of next year.

Package 2 was given to Woodruff Construction out of Tiffin. This package consists of equipping the well, the fence around the perimeter, and all the underground piping, the piping apparatus inside the building, running the pipe to the raw water line, adding controls and the electrical portion of the well.

The estimated cost of this package is $827,000.

The water treatment plant is included in this package. Hedgecock thinks the plant will be constructed in 2023.

"I believe this plant will be built sometime in 2023," Hedgecock said. "That’s probably the target. We will probably engineer it in the winter of ‘23. Maybe late 2023 or early 2024 will be plant construction. The estimated cost is $7 million; it's a huge cost. None of this has been approved, but we have the conceptual designs figured out."

This package is the most complex as there are many more moving parts and different pieces that need to be put together. It was the one most impacted by COVID-19 related pricing increases.

Construction is expected to begin on this package in the next couple of months on more low-grade things. Woodruff's project timeline is slated through June of next year. The expectation is that they will be completed mainly by April.

The final package is the raw water main project. This project will be done by Fye Excavating out of Sperry, Iowa.

Package 3 covers the raw water main installation that runs the treated water from the well back to Mt. Pleasant Utilities.

The estimated cost of Package 3 is $422,500.

This package is set to be completed by the end of this year. Hedgecock says it's essential to get the pipe in the ground before winter hits.

The well will allow more treated water to be produced over a shorter period of time.

The treatment plant at the utilities office is acting as the main plant that only puts out 1,000 gallons per minute. The new treatment facility will put out a targeted 2,000 gallons per minute.

The estimated cost of the well’s three packages is $3 million. This doesn't include a change in orders or other expenses.

With the project, some money will be coming back.

"Several years ago, we started working with the EPA," Hedgecock said. "We were awarded a grant. The grant is roughly $1,087,600. Yes, the cost of the project is above that, but as long as we follow the grant parameters, that money will come back from the federal government. That's not without a cost, though. We spent a lot of time wrestling for the grant, but our customers are worth it."

The hope is to be pumping water by June of next year.

The new facility will make it so there is never a water shortage for Mt. Pleasant Utilities customers.

"We want it, so when we have to shut down one plant, we don't have to worry about water shortages," Hedgecock said. "Right now, what we do is overproduce for an anticipated outage. We store water and get our tanks full. We rush, rush, rush to get it back in service. That's really a precarious feeling doing that. This will give us more room to get things done and not worry about it."

"Another important piece of this is that we're a growing community."

Comments: (319) 931-3393; hunter.moeller@southeastiowaunion.com