Pleasanton council approves added funds for temporary pump at city lake
- Roger Sims, Journal Staff
- 3 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Roger Sims, Journal staff
PLEASANTON – If all goes well, the residents of Pleasanton will be able to use water outdoors as early as Saturday. However, so far the attempt to connect a temporary pump to the city's water supply has been plagued with corroded fittings and deteriorated pipe.
The Pleasanton City Council in an emergency meeting on Wednesday, Aug. 19, voted to approve additional funds that contractors said they need to install a temporary pump that will pump water from the Pleasanton East Lake to the water treatment plant.
If they are successful in making the necessary connections and starting up the portable pump that uses a diesel-powered generator, the city could lift its outdoor water use ban by sometime Saturday.
The funds are for cleaning up the 4-foot-diameter by 30-foot-deep tube on the lake’s dam and for excavation to replace approximately 75 yards of pipe to the chemical building on the west side of the dam.
The additional funds will come from three sources, the water utility fund, the special project fund, and the water utility reserve fund. The council earlier this month voted to spend just over $8,100 to hookup and run the temporary pump for up to a month with the option to rent longer at a rate of about $4,000 a month.
Installing the two new 250-gallon-per-minute pumps is expected to cost about $108,000.
The contractors were thwarted on hooking up to the pump on Tuesday because of corroded pipe and fittings and had to wait to ask for more money. The work was delayed because the council, which is required to give a 24-hour notice before each meeting, could not approve the extra funds until then.
In a phone interview on Thursday evening, Richard Smith, who is working on the pumps, blamed the “super caustic” water in the lake, made from former strip mining pit, for its corrosive effect on the pipe and the pumps. He said the water enters the bottom of the tube through a gate that no longer closes because the link to the device that closes it has corroded away.
Smith said that the workers who installed the pipe to the pumps used a Schedule 40 pipe that has corroded so severely that it is like handling a round razor blade. One of his workers in trying to work with a pipe had his hand “shredded,” Smith said. That thinner-wall pipe is usually used on sprinkler systems that aren’t meant to withstand the use needed by a water supply line.
He said the team plans to sink steel mesh in the larger tube to filter out larger debris and secure it above the water line. When the replacement stainless steel pumps, which are designed for use in sewer lift stations but used in fresh water applications to avoid clogging, are installed sometime in the next three weeks, they will be attached to heavy-gauge Schedule 80 pipe that goes from the center of the dam underground to a fenced-in chemical treatment building about 75 yards away on the west side of the dam.
That pipe will be connected to an 8-inch line that runs 3 miles to the city’s water treatment plant by the school on the west side of the city.
Smith said that a couple of local plumbers as well as some council members met at the site and gave their approval of the plan after it was explained to them.
Smith said Kevin Starbuck, is expected to have the temporary pump operational on Friday, and depending on results, the council could meet as early as Saturday to pass a resolution that would reverse the previous restriction that currently forbids outdoor use of water.
Starbuck and Smith installed the new river pumps for the La Cygne water plant last year.
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