RWSA finds out how much pump station failure cost to repair

Almost two years have passed since a sewer pump station along the Rivanna River near a city park became inundated with stormwater, leading to raw sewage pouring into Moores Creek and the watershed for a 26-hour period.

That flow ended when a temporary bypass station was installed restoring the connection to the Moores Creek Advanced Water Resource Recovery Facility. Since then, the Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority has been working on permanent repairs intended to increase capacity to handle 50 million gallons a day.

At their meeting on November 18, the RWSA’s Board of Directors got an update on the costs of the project including how much insurance will cover.

Their written packet stated the total cost before insurance was $16.25 million, but RWSA Executive Director Bill Mawyer revealed that the final figures were lower.

“Our maintenance staff stepped up and was able to complete some work recently which reduced the cost to about $14.2 million for the total restoration of the pump station,” Mawyer said.

The total repair cost was $10.85 million and the Virginia Risk Sharing Association reimbursed about $9.2 million of that. Insurance did not cover the cost of improvements and the total cost to the RWSA was about $4.3 million.

“Better news than what we thought some time ago when we thought it was going to be $22 million to repair it, so that’s much better,” Mawyer said.

Learn more about the repairs on the RWSA website.

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