Sarasota News Leader

04/18/2014

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the diesel-engine-driven emergency pumps, adding two additional electrical pumps (iden- tical to the four already planned) and using diesel generators for backup power. "It means increasing the size of the wet well and adding additional pumps," noted Steve Topovski, the city's project manager. It further means that if power is lost, the emergency generators can get the pumping restarted in a matter of minutes at most. Garland and Topovski are wrestling with the engineering mess left when representa- tives of a previous firm walked off the job at the Mound Street and Osprey Avenue site. The aftermath has turned up a series of hor- rors, including a system designed to operate in a semi-permanent state of backup, and a planned boring under Hudson Bayou that would have drilled through the base of the Osprey Avenue bridge. Needless to say, there is a lawsuit over all this. The project began after Lift Station 7, which is three blocks away from the new Lift Station 87 site, repeatedly failed and sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of sewage into Hudson Bayou and hence into Sarasota Bay. The city is operating under a Florida Department of Environmental Protection (FDEP) consent order until the new station is functional. Monday's meeting saw the first slip in the work schedule. Garland said the switch from diesel-powered emergency pumps to diesel generator-powered pumps would take three weeks to design. That would push the com- pletion date into January 2016, if the decision were made to go with the switch. A second decision will determine the resil- ience of the facility to hurricanes. The state A November 2013 presentation to the City Commission shows the design of the pump station for the lift station. Image courtesy McKim & Creed Sarasota News Leader April 18, 2014 Page 49

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