Soap Lake sewer replacement on pace
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Crews with DW Excavation fill a trench after replacing a sewer line along Elder Street in Soap Lake on Monday.
SOAP LAKE — Sporadic rain managed to keep the dust down as crews replacing some of Soap Lake’s worst sewer lines worked along Elder Street on Monday.
According to Chuck Dompier, a resident inspector overseeing the work in Soap Lake for Yakima-based engineering firm Gray & Osborne, the company is about one-third of the way through replacement of roughly 10,000 feet of sewer line underneath Soap Lake’s streets and alleys.
“We started in April,” Dompier said. “We’re pulling existing and replacing existing sewer lines, and some water lines, but mostly sewer lines.”
It’s all part of an $8.7 million project to upgrade the city’s sewer and water systems, a prerequisite to repaving the city’s streets, according to Soap Lake Mayor Alex Kovach.
Kovach said around $5.5 million of that — a combination of a grant and a low-interest loan from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development — is paying for the sewer work.
Dompier said crews from Davenport-based DW Excavating will be working until September or October to install new sewer lines in two sections largely north of Main Street and east of state Route 17. Work along Elder Street will be done this week, with work along Main Street set to begin next week, according to a press release from Soap Lake City Hall.
In addition, crews from DW Excavating were bursting old pipes to install wider sewer lines along a portion of Dogwood Street in the northwest portion of the city as well as Seventh Avenue on the city’s south side.
Dompier said work was uneventful, and that crews were not finding anything “except dirt” as they dug.
“We have an on-site archaeologist,” he said. “If we find something, it will be exciting.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at [email protected].