The Sunset Metropolitan District has announced they will start the construction of a mechanical wastewater treatment and reclamation facility within the Santa Fe Springs development in March 2010. The development is northwest of the intersection of Falcon Highway and Peyton Highway.The district currently operates a wastewater treatment facility in Ellicott Springs that serves two customers: Ellicott School District and Sunset Village, a development of about 115 homes.”Our objective is to get our first 1,000 sewer taps on line and available to Santa Fe Springs and the Upper Black Squirrel basin,” said Sean Chambers, project manager.Construction is planned in two phases.Phase 1 consists of the installation of 12.5 miles of a sewer main line extending north from the current line at Highway 94 and Log Road to the Santa Fe Springs development. The line will connect Santa Fe Springs to the district’s wastewater treatment facility in Ellicott Springs. Phase 1 also includes installing a 1.5-million-gallons-per-day pre-treatment grinder and aerated grit chamber at the terminus of the main line in the Santa Fe Springs development and upgrades to lift stations at Ellicott School District and the Sunset Village subdivision.Final construction design approval is expected by April 8. “The district’s contractors [Bosco Construction and Planet Pipeline] are scheduled to begin excavation and preliminary dirt work by the end of April,” Chambers said. “Our construction schedule calls for the completion of phase 1 facilities by March 31, 2009.”Then, we intend to continue with phase 2, the construction of all the mechanical facilities required for full treatment at the Santa Fe Springs facility.”Upon completion of phase 2 construction at Santa Fe Springs in March 2010, the facility will provide its customers with recycled, non-potable gray water through the purple pipe system approved by the Colorado Department of Health and Environment in 2005, Chambers said.”From the 1960s on, Colorado Springs and some other larger municipalities have been irrigating with reuse water in parks and golf courses,” he said. “Until 2005, you couldn’t put it into a separate delivery system and take it to individual homes for irrigation use.”Chambers said he thinks irrigating with gray water is a better solution than re-injecting treated water into the ground because plants do a better job of removing nitrates and ammonias.”In the long run, irrigating with gray water is a form of recharge,” Chambers said. “The engineers can calculate how much water ends up back in the alluvial aquifer.”Ultimately, it means we’re not serving perfectly good, fresh drinking water to your lawn. We’re serving water that your lawn prefers because it has more micronutrients and organics. The fresh drinking water supply will ultimately last much longer.””Shaw Ranch would obviously be looking at urban services,” said Carl Schueler, manager of the county’s long-range planning division.”As you start to look at the regional capacity for any wastewater treatment facility south of Judge Orr Road, it potentially provides the opportunity for urban services to extend further to the north,” Schueler said.”Santa Fe Springs is an ideal location for being able to collect sewer via gravity from almost the entire upper end of the basin,” Chambers said.Gravity feed means that the system is less costly to operate, he said. Chambers cited “inherent problems” with lifting raw sewage through pumps. A gravity system is a “more efficient, maintenance free kind of system,” he said.The district is thinking of eventually running a line north from the Santa Fe Springs facility to Peyton, Chambers said. “There are problems out there with all these septic tanks,” he said. “They are polluting their own source of groundwater. It’s a problem that’s solvable as long as people can figure out how to work together to tie into a common sewer line.”Grants to mitigate the groundwater problems are available through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Chambers said. “With a grant, it would be a very reasonable cost to get all those people tied on to a central mechanical wastewater treatment facility,” he said. “For a small amount of grant money, the ultimate improvement to groundwater quality can be very large.”
