By Brittany Woodby

BWOODBY@CULLMANTIMES.COM

Engineers for Cullman County presented two different plans Tuesday night for drawing water from the Tennessee River to supplement the county’s water supply.

Nearly 100 people, including officials from the City of Cullman and Cullman County, attended the public meeting, led by engineer Chris Cousins of Municipal Consultants, Inc., the Birmingham-based firm the county hired to develop the project.

Cousins discussed three alternative water supplies which engineers have discussed since the early 1990s, including drawing water from Smith Lake, damming the Duck River and piping water in from the Tennessee River.

Both the City of Cullman and Cullman County have rejected the idea to bring water from Smith Lake, with the city preferring to build a reservoir on the Duck River. The county, meanwhile, is in the process of securing permission from the Tennessee Valley Authority to build an intake port on property the county purchased along the Tennessee River in Morgan County.

Cousins said if TVA grants the county permission to withdraw water, either of two plans to construct a pipeline to Cullman County would be comparable to the city’s Duck River proposal. Both plans include distributing raw water from the pipeline to northeast Morgan County.

The plans

The first plan would enable 22 million gallons of water a day to be taken from the river through a 30-mile pipeline to be distributed to northeast Morgan County and Cullman County. Cousins said the amount of water piped in could be increased to 30 million gallons a day if needed.

Under the first option the county would also construct a treatment and distribution system to send finished drinking water to residents in the regional service area. The total estimated cost of constructing the pipeline, treatment plant and necessary infrastructure is $117 million, not including operational costs.

Cousins also presented a second option, which would allow for the same amount of water to be taken from the river and still be distributed to Morgan County, but would supplement the city’s Lake Catoma supply. This plan would require raw water from the river to be pre-treated and mixed with raw water from Lake Catoma before it is treated at the Cullman Water Treatment Plant, which is owned by the Cullman Utilities Board. Cousins said he feels mixing the two raw water sources will be permitted by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

“We don’t expect there to be any problems,” he said, adding engineers have been collecting samples from the two sources, mixing them together and letting them sit to simulate the interaction between the sources.

Treating the water through the existing water treatment plant would cut the construction cost to $59.8 million with an estimated annualized operating cost of $5 million.

Cousins said there are several advantages to utilizing the Tennessee River as an alternative water source, primarily because the river is more drought resistant than the Duck River reservoir. He also said the river will provide “maximum redundancy” in the event Lake Catoma or any other additional reservoirs are contaminated or unusable. Additionally, including northeast Morgan County will expand the regional system.

Cousins said if construction were to begin today on the pipeline, it could be ready for use in two to three years. Duck River would require three to five years for construction to be completed.

The drawbacks

However, Cousins said there are two drawbacks to the pipeline plan. First, the project has not been permitted by either TVA or the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Cullman County Water Superintendent David Bussman said in an interview last week he expected to receive the permit from TVA within 30 to 60 days.

In order to begin construction, the county would also be required to obtain a Section 404 permit from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in accordance with the Clean Water Act. According to the corps’ Web site, “processing such permits involves evaluation of individual, project specific applications in what can be considered three steps: pre-application consultation (for major projects), formal project review, and decision making.”

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers studied plans for alternative water sources for Cullman County from 1993 to 2000, examining both Tennessee River pipeline and the Duck River dam. In 2000, it deemed the Duck River reservoir as the best option and issued a Section 404 Permit to the Cullman Morgan Water Authority to build the project.

Cousins also said the county has a “limited window of opportunity” to build the pipeline as made possible by House Bill 620, or the Morgan County Tennessee River Preservation Act in 2006. The bill states it will not affect any water providers in Cullman County “so long as such providers do not expand their geographic territory or wholesale customers beyond the area they serve on the effective date of this act.”

Presently, Cousins said the county uses an average of 4.5 million gallons of water a day and uses 7-8 million gallons a day during peak seasons. He said Morgan County currently uses 4 million gallons of water a day but will be granted more water from the pipeline as needed.

“They will get their share of water a day,” he said.

Growing demand, higher cost

Cousins said the assessment of the regional water demand predicts Cullman County will need another 12 million gallons a day within the next 30 years. With Morgan County’s needs and the commitment to provide the county with water, Cousins said 15 million gallons of water a day would be available through the pipeline for Cullman County, which would fall short of the demand in summer seasons.

“We’re not saying you don’t use Catoma,” he said. “We’re looking for a supplemental supply, and we think this pipeline will be more than adequate.”

Until the county reaches a higher demand, Cousins said the pipeline will be turned off to save on energy costs associated with treating the water and running the pumps which would push water over hills in the 30 miles from its source.

“You would use Catoma most of the year because energy costs are too expensive,” he said. “You’d actually probably only use the pipeline in the summer period.”

Though the county will not need the water it could be permitted to withdraw, Cousins said the Morgan County Tennessee River Preservation Act prohibits the county from selling the water to any other customers.

However, Cousins said there are no restrictions prohibiting the sale of water from Duck River.

Several residents asked questions regarding how the cost of the project would impact ratepayers. Cousins said there are too many variables in the project to produce an estimate of how the cost would be handed down to water customers.

Engineers with CH2M Hill, who are orchestrating the Duck River project on behalf of the city, gave an estimated construction cost for the Duck River reservoir at $59.5 million. At a public meeting in January, CH2M Hill engineers said they predict the cost would translate to roughly a 53-83 percent increase in water rates for customers. Engineer Tom Harwell said the estimated water usage rate in 2010 following the construction of Duck River would be between $2.44 and $2.60 per 1,000 gallons.

Harwell used the same formula to calculate the estimated cost of water if the Tennessee River pipeline was constructed and said water rates could increase by 59 to 244 percent, depending on which plan the county chose to pursue in piping water in from the river.

Cousins said he and his firm would work to determine an estimated water rate if either of the county’s options were pursued.