Expensive upgrades to downtown plant will keep clean water coming to Columbia customers

Columbia’s downtown water treatment plant that provides some 30 million gallons of water daily to 200,000 people is set for a $45 million upgrade project to begin this spring.

The improvements will continue the modernization of the 110-year-old plant at the Columbia Canal, which serves customers from downtown to Lower Richland.

Water customers shouldn’t notice any changes in their service during or after the construction, said Clint Shealy, the city’s waterworks superintendent.

A pair of storage tanks that together hold 6 million gallons of treated water will be replaced with two new tanks with double the capacity.

The project also will replace aged pumping buildings and equipment and outdated electrical equipment.

“We have used the useful life of them, and there’s new technology” that will make the entire process more efficient, said Joey Jaco, the city’s utilities and engineering director.

The plant has gotten various upgrades over the decades and supplies water that exceeds regulatory standards for cleanliness, Jaco said.

It’s a complex project that will take two and a half years to complete, the city predicts. The money to pay for it comes from water and sewer fees collected by the city and set aside over the past two years, the utility director said.

The project, the capstone of upgrades that have rolled out over the past two decades at the plant, is not related to the effects of the 2015 flood that threatened the city’s entire water supply, Jaco said.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Expensive upgrades to downtown plant will keep clean water coming to Columbia customers."