The pump station on busy Brady Road in Camas, Wash., had a reputation for pump failures, and maintenance and corrosion problems. The station, one of the city’s largest, served the populated west side.

The Public Works Department had replaced four wastewater pump stations in as many years, but the Brady Road station posed some challenges. First, it could not be taken out of service. Second, the site’s small footprint complicated the mechanics of building on it. The station is next to a steep slope and lies alongside Brady Road. Any construction would mean blocking one traffic lane for trucks and equipment.

“We had to complete the project efficiently and fast,” says Jim Hodges, capital projects manager for the city. As in previous pump station replacements, the department installed a pre-engineered system made by Romtec Utilities Inc. in Roseburg, Ore.

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

Lift station components — structural, mechanical, electrical, and communication — arrived in coordinated deliveries. The integrated system, configured to meet the city’s requirements, came pre-tested and ready to install, allowing the city to standardize its lift station network.

“The stations are all similar, enabling our maintenance people to work on them easily,” Hodges says. “They don’t have to learndifferent telemetry for different stations, and the same is true for the pumps.”

The pumps remained fully functional during installation of the new system, which took less than two months. Workers left the existing power service intact, installed its replacement, then started up and tested the new station before decommissioning the old.

The city added an innovative twist to the project. Contractor George Schmid & Sons of Washougal, Wash., removed the pumps from the old wet well and piped that well into the Romtec 8-foot-diameter precast concrete wet well. That gave the lift station more storage capacity, and the pumps run less frequently.

“We know the city’s west side is going to grow,” says Hodges. “Replacing the Brady Road pump station has made that expansion possible, and the Romtec system is providing critical reliability, as it does in our other pump stations.”