Pittsburgh water system ‘entering a new era’

One by one on Friday, laborers, designers, elected officials and staff from Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority signed a 48-inch-diameter water pipe that will be used at the new Highland Reservoir pump station. 

The authority staged the symbolic event to mark another milestone as it rebuilds a water system that is more than a century old. The $46 million pump station is among $470 million worth of projects the agency is undertaking to upgrade and add redundancy into the system that includes 965 miles of pipes and serves 265,000 residential customers and several thousand businesses in the city and a few northern suburbs.

As CEO Will Pickering put it, the station is just one component as the system is “entering a new era.” The entire project involves installing new service pipes to reservoirs, improving storage facilities and replacing elements of the purification system located along the Allegheny River across from the Waterworks shopping complex near Aspinwall.

When the project is finished in 2030, the system for the first time will have a series of backups if the main system fails. Pickering said having backups to treat and deliver water, known as redundancy, means fewer boil water orders and service disruptions because the system will have ways to work around the problems.

The result: fewer headaches for customers.

As Rachael Beam, PWSA chief engineering officer, put it, “It’s time to bring that system up to standards for years to come.”

The agency is required to do some of the work, such as replacing the 44 million-gallon underground chlorination facility known as the clearwell, under a consent decree with the state Department of Environmental Protection. That facility is the last step that kills pathogens just before water is distributed.

But because the system is antiquated and has no other way to chlorinate water, the agency is creating two new areas that can accomplish that task while it replaces the clearwell. Those areas are the Highland Park 2 reservoir and the 5-mile-long, 48-inch-diameter delivery pipe to the Lanpher Reservoir in Shaler known as a “rising main.”

Initially, the agency planned to add a second rising main to Lanpher and chlorinate there, but the cost would have been substantially higher than the $137 million estimate. Instead, the state agreed that the water sits in the delivery pipe long enough that the treatment can be done there.

The agency also is making upgrades to additional pumps and delivery lines that carry water to five reservoirs and 11 storage tanks that can hold 455 million gallons. Some of those elements are original equipment from the early 1900s.

Barry King, the authority’s director of engineering and construction, said those preliminary projects are scheduled to be done in 2028. Then, with other facilities available to chlorinate the water, the agency can begin the two-year process to replace the clearwell.

The new clearwell will be divided into two sections so that one can be shut down for repairs and improvements while the other treats water.

During Friday’s tour of the construction site in Highland Park, crews worked on the underground elements of the pumping station. Next they will construct a building above it with completion scheduled in 2026.