Saginaw officials hope soon to install a new wastewater treatment pipeline built and buried three feet beneath the Saginaw riverbed back when Harry Truman was president.Kaytie Boomer | MLive.com

SAGINAW, MI — Paul Reinsch doesn’t want to know what happens when all the toilet flushes from homes on the west side of Saginaw no longer go where they are supposed to go.

“That would not be good,” said Reinsch, director of Saginaw’s water and wastewater treatment operations. “That would probably make the front page of the newspaper.”

Preventing such an environmental nightmare is at the heart of the priciest of 31 items Saginaw City Hall department leaders recently added to a “wish list” of proposed expenditures that could be funded by $52 million in federal stimulus money.

Reinsch and his staff estimate replacing a critical piece of Saginaw’s aging wastewater treatment infrastructure would cost $7 million. Some or all of that estimate could be covered by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) stimulus that the Saginaw City Council ultimately will decide how to spend in the coming years.

“It would be preferable if ARPA would cover all of the cost, but if that’s not possible, covering $4 million of the cost would allow us to move forward on the project plans and development,” he said.

Saginaw City Manager Tim Morales said some of the infrastructure-related requests on the ARPA “wish list” will need addressing at some point, whether the financial support comes from the stimulus or funds tied to bonds and loans.

“Using ARPA funds could help level the future water and sewer rates citywide,” Morales said. “I’m sure that there will be additional analysis and discussion.”

It’s uncertain when the council could cast votes related to the $7 million pipeline project.

The pricey initiative would replace the existing reinforced concrete pipeline built and buried three feet beneath the Saginaw riverbed back when Harry Truman was president, Reinsch said.

For more than seven decades, the critical piece of infrastructure has served as an underwater bridge of sorts, allowing waste flushed down toilets as well as rainwater runoff to pass from the west side of the Saginaw River to the east side. That subterranean cross-river journey matters, Reinsch said, because the Saginaw Wastewater Treatment Plant resides on that side of the waterway, less than a half-mile south of Crow Island.

There is no wastewater treatment plant on the city’s west side.

The $7 million project proposal would replace that aging pipeline with nearly 3,000 feet of new pipeline, measuring between 42 to 48 inches in diameter, Reinsch said. Much of the dollar estimate accounts for the logistical challenges of installing a pipeline beneath a riverbed, he said.

Records show crews in the late 1940s installed the existing pipeline using cofferdams, which essentially removed water from isolated stretches of the Saginaw River while workers buried the pipe beneath the temporarily-exposed-to-air riverbed soil. They accomplished this task in a river estimated to reach depths of 27 feet.

A lifetime later, technological advances offer new methods. Reinsch said there is no decision yet on how officials could install a new pipeline, but the likely approach would involve boring a channel about 20 feet beneath the riverbed, inserting the new pipeline into the breach. It’s a task crews could accomplish without draining any part of the river.

“You’re talking about a lot of equipment setup and a lot of technical issues, abilities and knowledge,” he said. “That’s why this project is so expensive. It’s not a simple project.”

Reinsch said there is some urgency to move the project forward soon.

While an underwater inspection of the existing wastewater pipeline in 2008 showed no indications of imminent failure, the infrastructure is reaching its estimated life expectancy, he said. The evidence backing that estimate: Other parts of the system are beginning to fail.

In late October 2021, one of six raw sewage pumps at the Wastewater Treatment Plant failed. It was equipment as old as the underwater pipeline, and inspectors determined the damage likely was the result of seven decades of wear and tear. Reinsch said crews hope to replace that sewage pump this summer.

He said it’s critical Saginaw replaces its underwater wastewater treatment pipeline before it experiences an equivalent failure.

“We don’t want to go there,” Reinsch said of the environmental mess that could follow. “Let’s put it this way: People would be unhappy about it, and it would be a big deal.”

If the old pipeline failed to work, Saginaw workers would re-route the west side neighborhoods’ toilet flushes and stormwater runoff to combined sewer overflow facilities on that side of the river.

Typically, those facilities are utilized only when heavy downpours create more wastewater than the pipeline is able to carry across the river in time to be treated. On those occasions, the combined sewer overflow structures treat and release the intake into the Saginaw River.

“When you’re using (combined sewer overflow facilities), you’re basically providing some settling and chlorinating to kill the dangerous bacteria to the best of your ability, but it’s not as effective as what we do at the treatment plant,” Reinsch said.

If crews installed a new pipeline, city officials could rehabilitate the old pipeline to serve as a redundancy measure for its successor, he said.

The third-most pricy item on the City Hall “wish list” for stimulus expenditures also relates to Saginaw’s aging wastewater treatment system.

Reinsch said he requested $4 million to update an existing combined sewer overflow facility as well as the parking structure built on top of it nearly a half-century ago.

Frequenters of Saginaw’s Old Town business district likely are familiar with the targeted structure, even if they are not aware of its hidden-from-view functions.

On the surface, the structure serves as a large parking lot on South Hamilton that stretches from Hancock to Court, or kitty-corner from the Ippel building.

Beneath the surface lot exist several columns of additional parking lots officials closed off years ago both because of deteriorating structural conditions as well as frequent reports of “unsavory activities” between people there, Reinsch said.

Below the layers of parking spaces sits a combined sewer overflow facility that, in part, services one of the city’s busiest business districts.

Reinsch said the entire structure needs repairs and renovations. Crews built the facility in 1976, records indicate.

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