By Joseph Edgerton
Staff Writer

A 30-year-old wastewater treatment plant may continue to provide service to Pembroke and Allenstown, but at a cost.

Since Aug. 26, no new sewer hookups have been permitted, and plans for a new wastewater treatment facility have yet to be unveiled.

The Suncook Wastewater Treatment Plant has been running at 80 percent of its 1.052- million-gallons-per-day capacity for six of the last eight years. Dana Clement, superintendent of the plant, said a replacement facility is a long way off.

"If everything went to plan, we got the funding and the voters passed (a warrant article), we could start building in 2007," he said. "Blueprints for a new facility are still in the conceptual stage. We won't have a better price figure until the engineering stage is complete in 2006."

A new facility would be required to process double the current capacity of wastewater, or 2.1 million gallons per day, while halving the amount of pollutants in the water.

Clement said the current facility removes between 85 and 95 percent of the pollutants from the wastewater, but to double the flow of wastewater, the plant would have to cut pollutants by half.

Although the construction plan and timeframe are uncertain, the cost of the facility is not.

Clement said the cost of a new facility would be $7,760,000, and to the best of his knowledge 20 percent of that funding would come from the state Department of Environmental Services (DES).

The remainder of the cost could be obtained through additional taxation, grant funding, bonding or a user fee to tie in to the system.

$20,000 has been invested into the town's 2006 budget to deal with the inflow and infiltration of groundwater, which is responsible for a considerable amount of the water the facility treats, Clement said.

"The bulk of inflow and infiltration of groundwater occurs in the spring. During March to May of 2005, the average wet weather flow period was 1.5 million gallons," he said. "The dry weather flow period is 600,000 gallons, so that's 2.5 times our dry weather flow."

Measuring extraneous flow is a difficult process, especially given the 14 to 15 inches of water the region received in October. For every 225 gallons per day of groundwater that is identified, a single-family house may be allowed to tie into the sewer system.

Identifying the infiltrating water, however, is a difficult task. Standard procedure would include monitoring the actual water usage of a number of houses on a street and comparing that figure with their output.

"If we started today, depending on the availability of equipment and manpower, it would take us a minimum of three months," said Clement. "More realistically, it would take about five years. There are just so many places to measure and segregate."

For now there are a few options allowing for an extremely limited amount of sewer hookups. An Aug. 26 letter from the Department of Environmental Services to Allenstown said three provisions needed to be met before a connection could be set up.

The towns must rescind expired or unused wastewater connection approvals, document extraneous flow removal from the sewer connection system, or execute a contract for construction of DES-approved wastewater treatment facility improvements.

Clement said only one connection has been approved since the moratorium went into effect.

"There was one new connection, but he had a permit prior to the moratorium," he said. "The connection belongs to a singlefamily home in Allenstown."