WQCS00055_Follow-up to 9/16/2020 Site Visit_20200917

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Thomas, Zachary T
From:Thomas, Clark <[e-mail]>
Sent:Thursday, September 17, 2020 10:31 AM
To:Thomas, Zachary T
Cc:Lipscomb, Clarissa; Blackmon, Edward
Subject:[External] Henderson NC - Flow Tracking Reconciliation
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Good Morning Zach,
Thanks for coming out and talking to us yesterday at the Sandy Creek Pump Station about our readiness and course of
action to reduce our I&I.

As we discussed the City is taking a proactive approach to our Inflow and Infiltration problems and the City will be
submitting an application to the state CWSRF group for a $2.5 million loan later this month to begin fixing some of the
issues identified by staff and our engineering consultant. The city purchased and implemented 18 flow monitors and a
set of SL Rats (used to identify obstructions in the line) back in 2018 to help us pinpoint some of the problems identified
in the application.

Our organizational structure has historically placed the WWTP Director in charge of the sewer pump stations. The
individual that brought about this structural change retired in 2016 and his sucessor left the service of the City in June
2020. Both these individuals left no records of allocated flows at each sewer pump station. The city has a record of the
pump design capacity, FIRM capacity and in most cases we have a pump curve but we have no information with respect
to allocated flows.

Since we do not have a history of the flow tracking or allocation commitment made for each of these stations, it puts us
in flux with respect to where the state views our capacity at these pump stations. Henderson would like to sit down
with you and your staff and understand where our allocation lies with respect to pump stations and historical businesses
that made these allocations.

As you may or may not be aware of Henderson has historically been a textile mill town. With the signing of NAFTA in the
late 90’s many businesses closed their doors to open up south of the border. The City was forced to raise sewer rates to
offset this vital revenue stream that was lost during the textile purge from this state. Many of the businesses that were
heavy water users that remained in operation made significant improvements to their processes to reduce their
wastewater discharges and ultimately their wastewater bill.

Since the last two HWRF directors left no records of flow tracking we need to reconcile where the State views us with
respect to capacity and where we actually stand with our average daily flows. Our conundrum is if the State thinks we
are near capacity at one of our pump stations yet our ADFs are only at 20% of the FIRM we could be damaging our
ability to recruit new business. Also the City doesn’t want to spend millions of dollars on pump station upgrades based
on allocation that only exists on paper.

The City Manager and City Council have been working closely with the School of Governments over the last two years to
move forward on a redevelopment strategy and we want to be able to insure that we can continue to serve and improve
our the community during our redevelopment while providing safe and reliable infrastructure.

If you can provide a couple dates I would like set up a zoom meeting between our staffs to discuss these issues.

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Thank you for your consideration,
Clark

Clark Thomas, PE
City Engineer
City of Henderson
900 S. Beckford Dr., P.O. Box 1434
Henderson, NC 27536
Office: [phone]
Cell: [phone]
www.ci.henderson.nc.us

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