Columbia Sewers: A history well hidden

by Ray Beck

January 27,2007

While the growth of Columbia long has been debated, the history of Columbia's sewer system tends to remain an underground topic.

The handling of wastewater collection and treatment is important to a community not only for reasons of public health but also for the quality of its environment and its development.

In October 1897, Columbia Mayor G.L. Norvell proposed that the city build its first sewerage system and suggested it be a city-run operation that would cost only $6,000 and be paid off in three years with a 10 percent levy on the present taxable wealth of its residents. After voting it down twice, Columbia voters approved an $18,500 bond issue in 1900 to build the system with a larger main sewer along Flat Branch to convey wastewater to a new sewage "Imhoff Treatment Plant." Sewer lines were extended northwest up the Flat Branch to Hinkson Avenue. The 1900 project built a new sewage plant and 17,000 feet of sewer line, 6,000 of which was a 16-inch main line that extended from downtown to a new sewage plant, then up Flat Branch Creek to Hinkson Avenue and northward to a point just south of Wilkes Boulevard. The system would include the entire downtown business section of the city and would reach all public buildings, schools and hotels. No details are available about how hotels handled their sewage before this.

A May 11, 1900, advertisement in the Columbia Herald said "district sewers" were to be built by neighborhoods and that the expense of connecting to the sewer line would be paid by property owners, a policy that remains in effect today. Prior to building this collection and treatment system, human waste was handled via privies (outhouses), followed later by wastewater facilities such as septic tank/tile field systems. Outhouses and septic tanks were in use in some parts of Columbia until the 1960s, primarily in the central city west of Providence Road. More than 100 sewer districts have been established to remove privies, septic tank systems and poorly constructed private sewers.

The "Imhoff tank" was later replaced by an "activated sludge plant" at the same location along Flat Branch Creek just south of Stadium Boulevard. The plant was abandoned in 1978 when the new Regional Sewer Plant was built.

The location was then used for the first parking lot for the MKT Trail, the Martin Luther King Memorial and the Battle Gardens. The Audubon Society uses the remaining brick building.

Sewers are difficult and expensive to build around Columbia because of its topography. The region has many drainage areas that require multiple treatment plants or pumping stations to pump "over the hill" to the trunk sewer. Wastewater runs only downstream unless it is pumped.

As Columbia continued to grow, the city continued to expand its sewer system. Trunk sewers were added in drainage areas, and pumping stations were used where treatment was unavailable. Soon the city expanded into the Hinkson Creek drainage area, where there was no main trunk sewer line available.
Using a master plan prepared by consultants Black & Veatch, Columbia began to make major improvements to expand the system in the 1950s, and the city established a sewer utility, the first of its kind in the state. Funds were handled separately, and the costs of operating the system were paid from the utility. Monthly sewer charges, based on water usage, were levied, and revenue bonds supported from these fees were sold for major expansion, sewer line replacement and repairs. Property taxes were no longer used.

In the 1950s, the city constructed a large trunk line up the Hinkson drainage area and a new "trickling filter treatment plant" along the Hinkson Creek southeast of where Forum Shopping Center is today. The site was downstream from where Flat Branch Creek enters the Hinkson, and a new trunk line was connected along the Flat Branch to carry some of the sewage from the overloaded Flat Branch Plant. Abandoned when the new regional plant was constructed, the Hinkson Plant's main structure was boarded up, and its sludge lagoons were removed. By 1960, the city was served by two mechanical plants, two lagoons and several major pumping stations.

Unfortunately, in the mid-1950s, the city ran out of money to properly implement the sewer system upgrades. The Hinkson Creek main trunk line was designed by engineering consultants Black & Veatch to go underneath the creek bed, but the construction crews ran into too much rock. The city council voted to cut back on the scope of the project, much to the consternation of the consultants.

To cut costs, the trunk lines now crossed through the creek rather than under it. This arrangement meant that at these 26 at-grade crossings, debris would hit the pipes and regularly clog the stream. Even worse, periodically the creek debris would break the pipes and dump raw sewage into the Hinkson.

During one major flooding of Hinkson Creek, a debris pile at a sewer line crossing just upstream from the Rock Quarry Bridge not only washed out the sewer line but also caused the bridge to drop to the bottom of the creek. I designed a new abutment, and we raised the bridge and the kept it for a pedestrian crossing when the new bridge was later constructed.

Prior to my arrival in Columbia in 1960, I was a public health engineer for the State of Missouri, and I worked with wastewater collection and treatment plans. My professional friends advised me that Columbia's sanitary engineer position would be a major challenge because of the city's collection and treatment problems, which had been documented by the State Health Department.

Nevertheless, I took the job and started in the Public Works Department on Feb. 1, 1960, having been hired to correct the operational problems in the sewer utility and prepare plans to handle future requirements. I began by designing an inverted siphon, made of two pipes. The first siphon was constructed by our own city employees and installed underneath the creek bed as an experiment. We gradually replaced the at-grade crossings with these devices, which the design manuals told us would not work.
Fortunately, the devices worked for us.

There were other difficult problems to solve, and Public Works Director Raymert Miller outlined the bleak situation for me when I interviewed for the job. The city needed to construct additional sewer lines and treatment facilities to keep up with the increasing population, but it lacked adequate funding to correct the sewer line and treatment problems.

Meanwhile, the public complained that odors from the treatment plant on the Flat Branch could be detected as far away as the intersection of West Broadway and West Boulevard. In addition, the Flat Branch plant and Hinkson trickling filter plant were discharging poorly treated effluent into the creeks, and substantial amounts of solids from the plants were causing the creeks downstream to turn black.

During rainstorms, great quantities of stormwater entered the sewer system from downspouts, foundation drains, area drains in yards and poorly constructed sewer mains. These deficiencies meant that diluted, but untreated, wastewater from overflowing manholes, pumping stations and treatment plant bypasses flowed directly into neighborhood drainage areas and streams. Photos of the problem were often shown in the daily newspapers.

Sewage was also backing up into basements. I went out with our sewer maintenance crews sometimes to survey the flooded basements. I remember seeing floating mattresses and flooded furnaces in several parts of the city. I dreaded the frantic calls exclaiming that somebody's furnace was about to go underwater.

One of the first policies I asked the council to adopt was for all new sewer mains to be properly constructed and deeded to the city for operations and maintenance. Each lot would have its own sewer lateral to avoid mixed responsibilities. In the past, the city and residences had problems with multiple connections to private sewers. The lowest basement would flood first, and that homeowner had to pay for the repairs, which wasn't very equitable. Sometimes, when the sewage overflowed into yards, it was difficult for homeowners to agree about who should pay to fix the problem.

The only bright side to responding to calls about flooded basements was meeting interesting Columbians such as Jane Froman on Cowan Drive and W.C. Curtis on Westmont. In Curtis's book, A Damned-Yankee Professor in Little Dixie, he described how his house on William Street was connected to the new public sewer line in 1903 but some privies were not removed. After his family contracted two cases of typhoid, he moved to one of the first houses in the Westmont subdivision, which was connected in 1906 to a private sewer built by John Stewart, of Stewart Road fame. Many of these older houses were connected to such private lines, which continue as a source of problems today.

Shortly after beginning my new job, I toured operations with Sewer Superintendent Brad Breedlove and his supervisors. We tackled operational problems at the treatment plants. We made operational changes within the mechanical plants to reduce odors and prevent the leakage of wastewater solids into the creeks, and we provided operators with more training so they could voluntarily become licensed. Another small change did much good too: I directed that the plant floors be kept clean, polished and painted.

When I told them we should be able to eat lunch sitting on the floor, I'll bet the field supervisors felt like Army sergeants meeting a spit-and-polish second lieutenant showing off to his superiors. We got the plants so clean and organized that we invited the public in to visit. It really brought pride into the organization, and that pride trickled down and became contagious. Operators began to volunteer to train for licenses, as I had done earlier, having received one of the first Class A licenses in the state.

Fixing up the plants helped to reduce odor and stream pollution complaints, but they could not be eliminated until we corrected other problems, especially stormwater inflow. That meant we had to focus on inspections.

The Public Works Department had one retired civil engineering professor whose job was to inspect all new street, sewer, sanitation and storm sewer construction, which was a difficult task for one person, so I decided to help. The only way we had to check the sewers was with a mirror and a flashlight, and it was a big help when we got better tools in the 1970s. Each manhole was numbered for reference, and sewer flows were measured in each drainage area, followed by the expenditure of millions of dollars over a number of years to correct problems and pollution. A high percentage of the costs were borne by state and federal grants.

Cleaning up the city's infrastructure meant we had to "stop the bleeding"—the building of bad infrastructure—and then correct the infrastructure that hadn't been built correctly before. Sewer lines had to be inspected in a timely fashion just prior to the trenches being filled with dirt.

Unfortunately, sometimes contractors would dump rocks and boulders into the sewer trenches, which cracked the clay sewer lines, or they would build poor connections between sewer pipes and building laterals, both of which allowed stormwater to flow in.

I recall the first sewer line I inspected in Columbia was in the Rockingham subdivision, and I found the line being covered with rocks and dirt, which they were just shoving into the trenches. The contractor was Smarr Construction Co. I told Walter Smarr, "Mr. Smarr, you're going to have to rebuild it," and he was none too pleased. Then the owner of the property, "Colonel" A.R. Troxell, came to see what was going on. Troxell was called "Colonel" for two reasons. He had been a World War II military government officer in Europe, and he wore a white suit and a white hat that made him look like Colonel Sanders. When Smarr told him what I had said, Troxell asked, "Young man, who sent you from City Hall out here to harass the contractors?"

After a few tense minutes, when it became clear the sewer line could not be connected, the Colonel ordered Smarr over and told him to replace the line. The word got around quickly, and soon contractors throughout the city learned how to properly construct new sewers, manholes and cleanups in accordance with state requirements and local ordinances.

Many changes occurred in the sewer utility as the system grew. Prior to 1969, sewer lines were unclogged with a hand cable. Hundreds of calls were received with complaints. We purchased a mechanical continuous rodding machine in 1969, a hydraulic sewer cleaner with water forced from a jet in 1973, and a black-and-white TV camera to inspect lines in 1974. Millions of dollars in both grant and utility funds were used to upgrade the lines. By 1982, 2,354 faulty sewer line connections were sealed, followed by more than three additional miles of repairs.

Afterward, the environment was cleaned up to the point at which our last five-year average was reduced from hundreds of calls per year to a five-year average of 25 per year throughout our 600 miles of sewers. The city's operating personnel are well trained and dedicated, having been supervised by Terry Hennkens since December 1975, following the retirement of Brad Breedlove. They are on duty seven days a week, 24 hours a day.
I believe Mayor Norvell would approve of our system.

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