The Warner sewage disposal plant found a fix to a smell that has been wafting throughout town for several months.
Bacteria — or “bugs” as administrator Ray Martin called them — are integral to balancing a wastewater treatment plant’s nutrients or sensing toxicity. Martin said live bugs were imported from Sunapee and got to work.
“We had a major breakthrough and got it straightened out,” Martin said.
However, Warner Village Water District has another concern coming down the pipe: copper levels.
Members from New England environmental firm DPC Engineering presented a plan during a Sept. 24 meeting to create and update infrastructure to achieve federal copper level limits.
The plant has to apply for a discharge permit every five years. When it received the permit in 2016, it was advised to limit copper from its current average of 21 micrograms per liter to 2.9 micrograms per liter under guidance from the Environmental Protection Agency.
“All you really need to know is that that’s super low,” said Justin Skelly, an engineer at DPC, during the meeting.
For drinking water, EPA’s action level is 1,300 micrograms per liter and the water treatment plant’s levels were between 145 and 700 micrograms per liter, fluctuating as it traveled through the system.
As a facility built in the 1970s, Warner Sewage was not built to filter out metals and its mechanical integrity is 20 years past its life expectancy. According to DPC, all the necessary upgrades will cost about $20 million and two years of planning and construction.
A new building is required to house the copper filtration mechanism, as well as electrical systems, chemical treatments and storage tanks to power the process.
While the project earned a couple of loans, federal grants might be scarce. David Prickett of DPC said the U.S. Department of Agriculture told him directly that they won’t have any grant money available in the coming year.
“That’s the first time in my career that they wouldn’t have funded that,” he said. “It’s not looking good relative to grants.”
Warner Village has 215 customers in Warner’s downtown area, 180 residential homes and the rest commercial. With residents already concerned about their home assessments and property tax bill, some people at the meeting were concerned about another cost.
Tracy Wood, a civil engineer at New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, said organizations involved in the project are doing everything they can “to ensure that we’re looking at every grant opportunity and trying to get more money for the communities.”
The project is currently a quarter of the way into their design phase — during which they sent a preliminary design report to NHDES and EPA — with the plan to do pilot testing next year and begin construction sometime in 2027.
Martin said the plant started the process to meet federal regulations when they were first notified in 2016. He said regulations like this are difficult to abide by when rules and agency leaders change constantly.
“We’ve been at it for a long, long time,” he said. “We’re not dragging our feet.”
