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July 7, 2011

Public process helped make Brightwater a reality

  • County won public acceptance and kept work on track by listening to the community, says an HDR project manager.
  • By EDITH HADLER
    HDR

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    Hadler

    In the 1990s, projected population growth estimates in King County’s wastewater service area showed that the county’s regional wastewater treatment system would run out of capacity by about 2010.

    The county responded by carrying out an intensive planning effort known as the Regional Wastewater Services Plan, which called for a new regional treatment plant that would add much-needed capacity. The plan was adopted by the King County Council in 1999 after a public review process. The county then began its work to site, design and construct the treatment plant and conveyance system.

    These new facilities provide for the transfer of flows to the treatment plant and treated effluent back to Puget Sound. After 12 years, the work is nearly complete and the plant will be ready to operate within the year.

    The completion of Brightwater is an occasion to celebrate and reflect on how the county moved from a conceptual idea to a completed major regional project.

    The project was controversial at times, and the county understood that the siting of a new regional wastewater treatment plant and construction of over 13 miles of conveyance piping and pump stations would receive some opposition, yet the project was imperative and had to move forward.

    Photo courtesy of King County [enlarge]
    Work on the Brightwater treatment plant is nearly completed and it will be ready to operate in August. Planning began in the 1990s.

    Without adding new capacity to the county’s system there would have been increased sewage overflows to Lake Washington and potential regional effects, which could ultimately include a building moratorium. To get Brightwater online, it was important that the highest priority be to meet the project schedule within budget.

    A transparent process

    Perhaps the most important success factor for maintaining the project schedule was the county’s open and transparent process involving citizens and public officials.

    An executive advisory committee formed in 1997 and made up of city and county officials from King and Snohomish counties agreed that King County required a new regional treatment plant to serve the northern part of its service area. Building a new wastewater treatment plant and reconfiguring the service basins serving east and south King County would provide additional capacity for growth throughout King County and part of south Snohomish County.

    Early in the effort the county developed a comprehensive public involvement process to educate and listen to citizens, public agencies and elected officials.

    The county recognized that communicating with a public spread out over an area more than 20 square miles had challenges unlike other projects. The area included people and communities potentially impacted by both the treatment plant and conveyance piping.

    The county embraced the use of technology such as its website and emails to help communicate with the large and diverse group. Although using email is standard practice now, Brightwater established many of the protocols used today when communicating with the public using email and the Internet. By using email lists, the county could ensure that the public and the design teams heard the same message, which reduced the potential for miscommunication.

    During the alternatives-evaluation process, environmental process and final design, public involvement occurred in both small and large open public meetings. What the county heard was effectively communicated to the design teams and incorporated into the alternative-selection process and where possible mitigation was incorporated into the selected alternative. This iterative process of listening and incorporating mitigation drove the project to maintain public acceptance and the project schedule.

    Managing impacts

    The conveyance route for the wastewater was developed to control costs and respond to concerns about impacts of constructing such a long pipeline through an urban area.

    The original concept for routing flows to the Brightwater site was to construct pipelines mostly under streets using open-trench excavation and pump stations. To accommodate open-trench construction, the route was miles longer than the route that was eventually selected.

    Design refinements and public input identified other solutions, including tunneling under undeveloped right-of-way to reduce impacts. Identifying the potential impacts at the tunnel portal sites resulted in the engineers further refining the tunnel concept to reduce the number of tunnel portals and locate them with an eye to minimizing impacts.

    The county reduced project costs and impacts by pushing project engineers to design a single, technically challenging pump station. The result: the North Creek influent pump station, which is the only pumping facility off the treatment plant site within the Brightwater system.

    The effort to work with the community has paid off. The county developed informed consent for the project from the majority of the impacted public. Concerns and fears were heard and impacts managed. And the county is meeting its schedule to bring Brightwater online, avoiding wastewater overflows to Lake Washington and providing capacity to protect public health and the environment for a growing population.


    Edith Hadler is a vice president at HDR, where she manages the Washington state water business group and was the project manager for the Brightwater conveyance design.


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