VANDALIA — A local organization is the recipient of $2.4 million that was awarded from the state Infrastructure Bill.
Tri Cities Water services Vandalia, Huber Heights and Tipp City.
The money was awarded Tuesday afternoon at a ceremony that was help at the Taylorsville MetroPark. The ceremony was attended by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and Fran DeWine.
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The park looks pretty good now, but that was not the case a few months ago.
“Someone calls and says there’s a hole in the park and we go there and discovered its our sewer line. We had to caution the whole area off and reroute the bike trail so people couldn’t use that part of the metropark for over a year,” said Danny Knife who is Tri Cities Wastewater General Manager.
Knife said 500 feet of a 30-inches sewer line collapsed under the park.
“The pipe has collapsed three times. It cost us millions of dollars to fix,” Knife said.
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He said his team put a robotic camera through the pipe and found the 45-year-old main was deteriorating. And, in the last five years, that deterioration, has sped up, Knife said.
“When we dug up the pipe and started fixing it. We found more and more bad spots, so we had to keep fixing and keep fixing. We found a belly in the pipe and it wasn’t flowing downhill, and it was holding sewer gas and it was eroding the pipe very quickly,” Knife said.
After spending $2 million dollars to fix the collapsed portion of the pipe and the metropark, Knife said they asked the state for a $2.4 million grant to fix the remaining 8,000 feet of sewer main from Old Springfield Road to Interstate 70 to avoid more collapses in the future.
Officials said the work can be done without having to dig the pipe up.
“We’re essentially putting a liner in there. We’ll blow it up and it’ll seal the bad spots in there and make it brand new,” Knife said.
According to Knife, he plans to bid the project at the first of the year with work starting as early as August 2022. He said taxpayers in the tri city region won’t notice any disruption to their services.
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