Faced with problems involving overflows and drinking water contamination, the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. has moved to update its over six-years-old wastewater master plan.<\/p>\n
The CUC board of directors instructed the management in a meeting Tuesday to contact the Hawaii-based Duenas & Associates and see if the consulting firm would be interested in updating the wastewater plan it did for CUC back in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
The CUC board voted unanimously to sole-source the update project, noting that it would be a lot more expensive to bid it out and hire another group to formulate a whole new plan.<\/p>\n
CUC chair Francisco Guerrero said the board expects the planned update to cost less than $100,000. A new study, on the other hand, is estimated to cost over $300,000, he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe wastewater plan that we have is outdated; it been more than six years since it was made. We need to update it to meet environmental regulations and requirements,\u201d Guerrero said.<\/p>\n
He said that the Agingan Point wastewater treatment facility was originally built to take in only about 3 million gallons of wastes a day. However, the increased volume of wastes being discharged by island residents now requires the plant to have a capacity of about 5 million gallons, Guerrero added.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s causing a lot of problem with backflows and contamination of drinking water,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had earlier cited CUC for the faulty design of the Agingan facility\u2019s existing pipeline.<\/p>\n
Aside from the treatment facility problem, the CUC also faces major sewer problems, including recurring overflows in different villages on Saipan.<\/p>\n
Based on previous citations by regulatory agencies such as the Division of Environmental Quality and the Coastal Resources Management, the recurring sewer problems are caused by poor system maintenance, possibly a design problem, and lack of facilities.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Faced with problems involving overflows and drinking water contamination, the Commonwealth Utilities Corp. has moved to update its over six-years-old wastewater master plan.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-86482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-local-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=86482"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/86482\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=86482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=86482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=86482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}