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Brady Road:  Fast lift station replacement critical for busy road

Camas, Wash., is a town of 15,000 on the Columbia River outside the Portland, Ore., metro area. In order to serve its growing population, the city’s Public Works department operates an aggressive program to update existing sewer infrastructure.

In the last few years, Camas has replaced four wastewater pump stations. When it came to replacing the fifth, on busy Brady Road, the city faced some challenges.

A failing pump station

“We had a lot of pump failures and maintenance and corrosion problems,” explains Jim Hodges, the city’s Capital Projects manager, “and we knew there was going to be future growth in the area. Having reliability there is pretty critical.”

The Brady Road station is one of Camas’ largest, serving the city’s populated west side. Shutting the ailing station down while a new one was installed was not an option––the old station had to be kept in service.

The mechanics of building on the site, which is limited by topography to a very small footprint, was also a complicating factor.  The pump station site is adjacent to a steep slope and is located alongside Brady Road. During construction, it was necessary to
block one lane of the road for trucks and equipment.

All of those factors meant the project had to be done efficiently—and fast. Camas officials didn’t have to look very far to find a replacement system that would meet those needs. Like the previous pump stations it had installed, the Brady Road station would be a pre-engineered system manufactured by Romtec Utilities of Roseburg, Ore.

“This was the last of a five-year program to upgrade one pump station annually.” Hodges says. “We put in Romtec in all of them.”

Romtec’s integrated systems have allowed the city to expedite installation of these five stations. Camas received all lift station components––structural, mechanical, electrical and communication––in a coordinated deliveries to each site, pre-tested and ready to install.

The complete systems, configured to meet Camas’ requirements, have allowed the city to standardize its lift station network.

"The stations are all very similar, and that allows our maintenance folks to work on them easily,” Hodges says. “They don’t have to learn different telemetry for different stations … the same is true for the pumps.”

Putting it all together

The installation process at Brady Road took less than two months from start to finish. To keep pumping during construction, the existing power service was left intact while a new one was installed. The existing pumps remained fully functional during installation of the new Romtec system. Thus, workers were able to start-up and test the new station before the old one was taken out of service.

The city added an innovative twist to the project by using the old wet well for additional capacity. Contractor George Schmid and Sons of Washougal, Wash., pulled the pumps out of the old wet well, then piped it into the new Romtec 8-foot-diameter pre-cast concrete wet well, giving the lift station more storage capacity and enabling the pumps to have less frequent run times.

“It was a very successful project––it was built on time, under budget and we had no change orders,” Hodges summarizes.  “The system was exactly the way we wanted it––we put it in, it worked, and we walked away from it.”