 Hello, everyone. Welcome to tonight's rather special edition NPA meeting. My name is Jeff Comstock. I'm a member of the Ward 7 Steering Committee, and the motivation for this meeting actually came out of a coffee time at the bagel with a group of city counselors a couple of weeks ago at the end of July and suggested that there were a number of folks in the neighborhood that were definitely interested in talking about the sewer project. So the Steering Committee, you put this single topic NPA meeting together, and so with us this evening is Megan Moyer, who's the director of the Water Resources Division with the DPW here in Burlington. So before I turn the presentation over to Megan, at our NPA meetings we always try to provide a short segment for anybody who may have questions or announcements or comments that are not directly related to the agenda because we'll come back to that in our discussion time later. So does anybody have any neighborhood or community announcements that they want to make before we get started? All right. Everybody here is on task. So Megan, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to you and you've got your screen there, so go ahead. Is it possible to minimize the video view? There we go. Awesome. Thank you. Hi, all. Thanks for taking the time on what is it Thursday? Yes, Thursday night. I appreciate having the opportunity. It's a lot easier to have these conversations, just one-on-one in person versus back and forth on email. So today I just wanted to bring you up to speed on everything that's happened. I'm sure many of you have followed the stuff on social media, but just stepping you through it, talking a little bit about the history and then obviously trying to tell you as much as I can tell you about maybe what the future holds, and then certainly answering some of your questions and with that. Just to start off, I found this picture. This is the original installation of one of those sewer crossings in 1959. I believe the methodology back then was literally a lay pipe on the ice and then blow up the ice and then let it sink. So that was acceptable back in the 1950s as a methodology for conveying sewage. Let's see. There we go. It's delayed and you can't see it super well. Megan, do I take the mic with you? I can or actually I just realized I have a little pointer so I don't have to walk around. Let's do that. So this is our GIS and all these other lines down here. Some of those are water lines, but they're also what we call the collection system. So there's collection systems for stormwater and for wastewater and in some places like parts of the New North End and other parts of Burlington, they are combined sewer so the stormwater goes into the same pipe. When you ever see some of our maps, the pipes that are purple usually indicate that they are combined. If they're pure red, they're sanitary sewer and then the ones that are sort of greenish blue are separate storm sewer systems. But what the sewer crossing is when we talk about the sewer siphon, is that sewage from about half of the New North End really mostly the north-eastern side of North Ave. Discharges to this location here. Then in the 1950s when there, probably what happened is that that's just where the sewage went before there was a wastewater treatment plant. The wastewater treatment plant wasn't built until the 1950s. So it probably was, hopefully at least sewage was being carried away from people's homes, and it probably just straight piped to the river without any treatments. That's how it used to be for downtown. It would go straight to the bay and with decades of improvement, we are getting better and better and still not perfect. But so back in the day, as they knew they were going to build North Plant, which is at the end of North Ave, we have three wastewater treatment plants. Our biggest one is on the waterfront main plants. We have another small one on river side and then your wastewater here all goes to North Plants. So probably the engineers back then when they were thinking through it, one option that we're thinking about now is to, do I need to unmute? Let me freak it out for that. Where does it start over there? It starts basically and I have another map here, which shows this is the whole area that drains. So there's systems of pipes in this whole area that drain sewage all the way to that point, which is just to the west of the Heineberg Bridge. So if I go back here and I'm happy at the end, I can take you to our actual map and zoom in and out and we can fly you anywhere you want. You can look at your house and see exactly where the water goes. So the water's coming, the sewage is coming and it's coming into this pipe here, and then what they did is they laid pipe, it's an inverted siphon so it's not pure gravity. It's like you can get water to flow even though it goes down and then up if there's enough pressure. So it laid, when they originally did it, laid it on the bottom of the river, maybe buried in a foot over time with sediment, and then it goes a half mile across Half Moon Cove, buried probably at three to four feet. Is that Colchester? Yep, it's Colchester. So somehow we got permission back then. I don't know if back then I know there used to be a closer relationship with Burlington and Colchester. So in order for the online audience and the TV audience to hear the audience? I need to repeat their question. You can use the microphone. Yeah. If you don't use the microphone. Smart. So it crosses over land and then it crosses again back to North Plants. Let's see. This was acceptable practice in the 1950s. It conveys sewage without pumping. So one of the things that we're thinking about instead of doing this mode and we'll get into it more is a more modern system might be to install a pump station, a permanent version of the pumps that we have there now, and actually pump it. I can hear myself. I don't know. I can actually pump it to North Plants. The reason why engineers and frankly any of us try to not pump when we can use gravity is it requires electricity. So it would have had long term. Every single year the city of Burlington ratepayers would have been having to pay the pumping costs of pumping the sewage. So back in the day using gravity, using a siphon was the acceptable practice. We've gotten the questions, have we had this problem before? I joined the city in 2009 as the stormwater program manager and then I took over the whole kit and caboodle in 2016. It's been quite the ride. In 2005, the first crossing, the upstream crossing broke. It didn't break due to the conditions that we were seeing, that we think contributed to the second crossing breaking the red arrow. It was spring flows from what I understand and they believe that the mechanism was that some armoring had occurred on the coal chester side which then made the river move around a little bit and then it undermined the pipe. In 2005, they were able eventually to get divergent to do an in-river repair, and then the permanent fix was to directionally drill. So directionally drilling is instead of cutting an open trench you have sort of like a joystick subterranean drill and they were able to drill the pipe and lay a new pipe under the river. I think it had a depth of about 20 feet below the river. So that was done in 2006. Back in 2006, it cost about $1.5 million. There wasn't a flood event, so it was entirely on the city rate payers were still paying that down today. At the time they looked at the second crossing, logical like if this happened here, then maybe it would happen in the next place. What they found was that the second crossing was not as susceptible to the scour events that affected the first crossing. It did recommend that they look at doing other things. One of which was armoring the pipe. I think at the time the engineers from my understanding didn't want to go that direction because we now know armoring can usually mess things up. Anytime you armor mother nature, she usually gets mad and takes it out somewhere else. What is armoring? Armoring would be like taking the pipe and bearing it with additional stone like laying stone on top of the pipe. They didn't think that the second pipe would be subjected to scour velocities, the undermining of the pipe and then having it be exposed. They said that the likely damage to that second pipe would be debris entrapment, which is what we think probably happened with this really high flood events. Trees in some places there were cars, boulders tumbling down the river, likely whacked this pipe and when I show you the photo of the limited area where we think the pipe is broken, it lines up. Can I interject the question? Where this discussion is leading us is that it's actually the second river crossing that you believe is broken? Yes. Okay. Thank you. We believe we've done some testing and we believe we have confirmed that it is in fact the second river crossing and it's not the first river crossing or both because we've done dye testing and we're seeing the dye appear in the exact same place every time we do the dye testing. So it's good that the first one held, it hasn't been affected but obviously super crappy that the second one didn't hold. So then the question is, well why didn't the city decide to do directional drilling of the second one proactively and can't travel back in time, but what I suspect is if you look at the first one, the first one's actually easy to directionally drill because you have this access area. You've got access pretty close roadway. I don't know if this was built back then, but there is easy access because when you directionally drill, my understanding is you need a receiving pit. You have to dig a hole on the other side for the pipe to come up in and then reconnect things. So you can do that on that side. Over here, there's no road, there's no path and so 1.5 million to do this one, I think it would easily be much more expensive because you're talking excavators on barges floating up the river in order to create a receiving pit. Doesn't mean it can't be done, doesn't mean that we're not looking at that as an option and looking at all the permitting because that's probably wetland and it looks like nice habitat to me so I don't really want to mess with it unless we have to. But anyhow, that's what I know about why didn't we fix this before. Does anybody have any questions on this particular piece? I can certainly let you know if I think I'll answer it later. Yes. Thinking about, as you said, the first pipe crossing that was directionally drilled is actually below the riverbed. So if you have to directionally drill the second crossing below the riverbed, are you going to lose some of your siphon flow or is that going to require pumping because it's at a lower? No, and I play an engineer, but it's not my fit like they can make siphons work. As long as there's flow pushing the siphons, even though it goes down and then up, it still works because that first one goes down and then up and then travels via gravity, I believe, over land and then it would go down and up. It already goes down and up because it's on the bottom. Wherever the final outlet is, is really the deciding point on when the siphon works? I think it's more about the flows upstream. I can certainly get a, maybe it would be good for me to get the engineer to do a little slide just on how siphons work. Okay. Thank you. It's like if you start, as long as the elevation of the, eventually where it's going is lower than the original elevation then I believe it can still do the Lipsy Doodle. Yeah. What else did I want to say? The challenge is, and if you don't know that much about rivers, and I don't have the whole river here, geomorphology, rivers like to move and we're on the outside bend of a river here, not the best place to be doing things because that's usually the place where things scour more. Even when I start thinking about directional drilling, not completely sure that that is the best option and why we are looking at other options. Yep. Just a question. You're looking at 1940, 50 design structure with what's going on crossing to river points. The temporary fix was to run above ground that's in place now. Is there any thought of just taking that and putting it along the upper side of the river and following the river above ground instead of going through all the logistics and the breakage on two crossings for the future? Yeah. Plan B or C or D? Yeah. I will get to it. We have already put out an RFP for the design engineer to look at a series of alternatives and one of them, it wouldn't be putting the pipe above ground, it would be burying a permanent pipe, what they call a force main, and then pumping from that elevation to North Plant. I don't know what the alignment is. It would be probably in roadways, not across people's lawns or underneath people's properties unless we went really, really deep directionally drilled. All of that has to be worked out. One other question. There's a couple of thousand toilets going in and washing machines and everything into the project at the diocese building. Now, that doesn't necessarily come here, but adding that to the whole grid, is there an idea of maybe putting with the money around from the government now, is there any idea of building a newer sewer treatment plant at the beginning of that so you don't have to even deal with any of that? Are you talking about Cambrian rice? Yes. Cambrian rice. I know it goes the other way, but it's the idea of the system totally. I mean, simultaneous, well, we're still doing it. We're already in planning design stages for upgrades for all three treatment plants. We're trying to figure out what the cost is. It is substantial and contemplating bringing it to the voters in the very near future. They did, but unfortunately, it is not necessarily earmarked for this type of project. Overall, the money, even though it is the largest amount of money that has come down in decades, it still doesn't touch what the total needs are. I forget if it's like the needs in Vermont alone are estimated to be about $2 billion for clean water, and I think we got 350, 350 million, 150 million of which are earmarked for very specific issues, which are highly important, lead service lines, and PFOS, and then the remainder is left for us who are dealing with these existing infrastructure issues to get in the ring and fight for. I'm not saying I don't like the money. I'm just saying that unfortunately, there's not this surplus of money that I was certainly hoping for when we heard about the infrastructure bill. We're doing everything we can to grab as much as we can, but in this project, we're really trying to angle as to how much FEMA money we could get, and I'll get into that in a little bit. Go ahead. Just a silly question. I'm far from being an engineer, but I just wonder if it's possible, if it's so expensive and so dangerous to go under the river, other than the cost of pumps and electricity to run the pumps, could a line go under the bridge crossing into Colchester? What is that called? You just said the name of it. Heineberg Bridge? Heineberg Bridge, and then reconnect to the underground pipe, and then another bridge for just the purpose of a sewer line that runs to the plant from the Colchester side rather than going under the river. I mean, so build a bridge. It'd be a lot less money to build a bridge than to dredge underneath the river. Let's think about that. We've already got a bridge. Right. So freezing can be an issue. I mean, as long as you usually have constant flow. That's true. Yeah. The other piece is that half-mile section makes me nervous. I can't clean it. I can't inspect it. It's the half-mile. This section that goes over land, you see this section? Yeah. But could it reconnect to the existing infrastructure that's already underground with a little bit of construction? What infrastructure that this? You've already got infrastructure crossing the Colchester, whatever the little bay is, where your arrow is now. That's all underground now, right? Yes. So if it went underneath the bridge and then reconnected underground, and then surfaced again over by the plant, and went over a bridge to the plant. Yeah. I'm not familiar with the sewer bridges, but all ideas are good. Yeah. I don't know. Florida. Florida, yeah. They don't freeze. The freezing, it complicates everything. I mean, I grew up in Texas and I don't really want to work there because there's lots of snakes in the type of work that we do, but let me go on and then let's come back to like some brainstorming because I definitely want to hear everybody's ideas. So we talked about this is the rough area that flows to this point. Sorry. North plants, typical daily flows in dry weather, because there's some combined sewer. Dry weather, it's about 750, 800,000 gallons. And so roughly as we were estimating, if we didn't implement any fixes, we were looking at about 350 to 400,000 gallons of sewage that would be entering the river every day. Per day. Yep. If we were sitting back on our heels and not trying to do the things that we're doing, which are not perfect, but they are better than that quantity of sewage going into the water. And my understanding from the last time, the 2005, like they thought about doing the temporary bypass, but I think back then didn't have the staffing and didn't implement it. And so actually there were multiple weeks of a large amount of sewage going in until they could get in and do the in-riber repair. So where did the sewer start in the river of Mandel? Pardon? Could you repeat to the microphone? Where did the leak into the river? The leak would have been here. Whoops, there we go. See where my little dot is? The leak would be right about there. That was the only, the leak this year is down there. It's down there, which is about, I don't know if it's about two miles from the river mouth by, if you know, if you go the whole flow. And then when we've had the, I guess no, the same thing, even when we've had our recent hiccups and overflows because of the pumping system having issues, it's still coming out there. It's still coming out there. I think today there was an issue today and that one actually might, the discharge I think came out over here because it went overland, because of the fountain situation. It went in it up there too? It did go in up here. Yeah, somebody told me that. Yep, no, I got a picture of it. I'm not here to hide anything. Oh no, no, somebody had told me that and I said, you know, I live right along there and it flooded over into my backyard and I don't know if it's contaminated. Oh, let's make sure we talk afterwards and make sure we get somebody out there to see if the flow path went that way. Okay, good, very good, thank you. Let me just interject something. So I think the people at home, typically they can see my camera shot of these people here as you're speaking, but the way we've got it set up today, I think in other words, I'm saying that nobody at home can see you. See me? Right. Okay. So the people at home are only seeing this. Okay. Typically they can see both. That's fine. I look fantastic, but you know, showered special. People at home might be a little confused because they can't see you. See me? Okay. Is there anything I can do about that? Okay. So just going back to why we got to this place, I think everybody knows there was record rainfall in the upper portion of the Winooski. Burlington actually on the July 10th, 11th and even the storms prior to that, we didn't, we got a fair amount of rain, but it was like slow and steady rain. It was a long period of rain, which I mean, I was sort of like, oh, did we actually escape unscathed because I was sort of expecting there to be damage and there wasn't, right? And then July 11th, 12th, that's when the flood waters got to Burlington. I remember I took my kids over to the Winooski bridge just cause it was such a monumental event to see the power of the water. It's the third, when I was looking at the flow record, it's the third highest stage on record. I forget the other one was like in the 1930s and then obviously the 1927 flood. Incidentally, the 1927 flood. So I think the stage at Essex Junction, this flood was like 25 feet. The stage, the depth of the water in the 1927 flood was 51 feet, which is just like, as a water person, I can't even imagine like, if you think about the destruction that happened like holy moly. Anyhow, once those flood waters hit and things started to rise here, it was July 12th in the early morning that we noticed an operator came in at six and did their checks and realized there's not very much flow coming into North Plant. That operator was actually, he's been with us for long enough. He was there for the previous break and immediately recognized it as crap. We have another break. That's a good word. Yes. We say that quite a bit in other things. So, I am really proud of my staff in this whole process. Again, it's a super crappy situation and they have banded together and had multiple people working on different things. By 845, the wastewater operators were able to get into the manhole. So there's a manhole, a utility access point, the round cover things, where the pipe from the siphon comes in and then the pipe from North Ave trunk line comes in. And when the siphon broke, the water that was coming down North Ave was actually going back out the siphon so we were losing almost all of the flow from the new North End out the pipe. They acted really quickly and by 845, they had blocked off the sewer siphon pipe to make sure that at least the flow from North Ave was getting to the plant. So that was like first emergency mitigation. It keeps asking me to unmute myself but I don't think I should be unmuting, okay. By the end of the day, we had, so whenever there's a sewage spill, we have to post to the state. There was a law, I don't know, Julia, you remember, it's 2016 maybe, so public notification law. So these things used to happen all the time and the public wouldn't know unless you were part of a community that was really active in telling you. So whenever we have any issue, whether it's a sewage spill, whether it's a combined sewer overflow, whether it's a, sometimes like this summer we had somebody who discharged some weird roofing, roofing chemical that got into the storm sewer system. Any of those types of things we report and you can sign up for the alerts online. I can show you where that is so that you just know when these things are happening, right, because information is power. We, very conservatively, so that same law requires that when you have a spill, you have to post public access areas within one mile downstream of where the release is. We went conservative with all of the flows that were happening and with the size of what we were discharging and I basically, instead of taking the point where it was coming out, I decided to take the mouth of the Winooski and just say, let's go a mile from there because that seemed most safe. Frankly, the amount of stuff and crap and pollution that was coming down the Winooski, not saying that our stuff was okay, but like, I certainly was not swimming with my children in any waters or recreating because there was a lot of stuff in the river. But one of the things I wanna say is, so the, I think, a mile downstream from the Red Star, I don't know if you can see that up there, it's a bit upstream of the boat launch, the one that's, I can't remember the name of it. It's the second. Hours? Hours? No, no, no, the one on the Colchester side, the one that you can access off of the bike path. So when we've had these other smaller discharges because of our pumping system having a flowed issue, we have not been posting the larger area because we are following the law which says only a mile downstream and because of the size and the risk, we're only considering this a mile downstream. I just wanted to explain that so that people were like, well, why did you post North Shore back then and now you're not posting it, that's why. And we can have a conversation about if that's okay or not. The mile is from the state. The mile does not consider the water body and the flow and all the things and I don't have a model to really be able to say if a mile is appropriate or however many miles. It goes off the concept that generally, the further you go downstream, there is more dilution and so the risk to somebody of getting sick when they're contacting, when they're recreating in waters is less. Doesn't mean it's not there, but it is less. Let's see, those are the signs that we had. And then the other piece, and if you haven't gone to our website, we put up a whole page where we've been keeping track of everything that we're doing and the whole progress. So I'm sure we'll have more of these meetings as everything progresses, but if you're curious, like, hey, what's happening? You can go to burlingtonbt.gov slash water when you ski break July 12th and everything is tried. We tried to lay it all out there, including like an FAQ. Let's see. So July 12th, this was a little bit of a crazy week. I was supposed to go on vacation this week, but I did not go on vacation. So by the evening of July 13th, we had implemented a pump and haul plan. So we contracted with BP wastewater and we basically said, how many trucks can you give us to go 24 seven around the clock so that we can at least slice another slice of the sewer piece off. And so we were able to implement that. On average, they captured about 220,000 gallons a day. So about half of the sewage that was going in. So we did another reduction and overall, over the course of pumping that they did while we were building the temporary system, they prevented about 2.5 million gallons that would have otherwise gone into the river. So again, not the full solution, but definitely a win in my book. When I look at the flows that went in, we expect the sewage part to be about that because it's about half that we were capturing. The challenge is, as I've said, we've had, as you all know, a number of storm events. So the overall volume of water, like when we report it to the state is larger because there's storm water mixed in with the sewer, but the yucky, the super yucky part, the sewer, the stuff that's coming from your toilets and whatnot is about, we expect the same sewage fraction. Does that kind of make sense? By the evening of July 14th, we were already had the contractor ECI mobilizing to start building the system. So basically by over two days, I call it Iron Chef, Iron Chef Cooking, this is Iron Chef Engineering, where it's like team of engineers, you have 24, 48 hours to figure out this really challenging problem. So they had the size pumps, size pipe, figure out if it was even feasible, figure out how we would do it, meet with various people about where we were putting the pipe and so on and so forth. Is it working? It is working, it's not working perfectly, but it's working I would say 95, 98% well. So we constructed, July 17th is when we started constructing the 5,000 foot long force main. Yep. What do you mean by well? I mean that it is capturing and conveying, collecting the sewage that would otherwise go into the pipe and then leak out into the river. It is on most days, probably 98%, I haven't done like a full volumetric analysis, but it is capturing the vast majority of the sewage that would otherwise go into the river. So there have been three issues and I have detailed them later on in which we've had some pump issues, pump float issues, where something's got hung up and then the pumps can't keep up and so some is spilling out, not the whole 400,000 gallons, but like 10,000 gallons, something less than that. Today we had a bigger issue where a pipe burst and so more was released and we've reported that, but I definitely detail the places where it's not working well. It has having a little bit of trouble with the rainfall events that we've been getting, I think as we all are having trouble with the rainfall events. When we get long duration, slow rain, systems can keep up with it. When we get the inch of rain in an hour and it dumps on us, these thunderstorms that Vermont didn't used to get, but we're getting now, systems have a hard time because the water is just hitting it too hard. And that's combined flow that's going there? Yeah, so one of the things we did early on, but we've backed off of it in some locations we blocked catch basins, storm drains in a couple of different places to try to limit and to basically say, well, I know nobody likes puddles, but a puddle of storm water is better than sewage in the river. We do still have some of those blocked off, but in- Are those tar paper mats with the grass on top? Yep, yep, but when and where they have caused problems or are more problematic, we have decided to remove them. Does that answer your question? I'll probably get into it a little bit more and I can tell you the specifics of what's been happening. Is it a verbal question or a chat? Okay, Robert, unmute yourself and ask your question very briefly please. I don't know if he's able to put it in the chat, we could maybe address it that way. Okay, Robert, if you wanna type the question into the chat, that would help, thank you. I mean, just, I guess, from my perspective, yes, we are having overflows, but not having this temporary bypass in place would mean that we would be discharging at least 250,000 gallons a day. And so on the whole, on balance, it is still much, much better than doing nothing. It is not, we're not stopping here, it's why we're trying to get divers in the river, so on and so forth, which I will get into. Hi, Jean. So by July 25th, the contractor actually was able to work a lot faster, even then we thought we were estimating about two weeks and it was shy of two weeks, that they were able to lay a full 5,000 feet of this 12 inch pipe, this black pipe, and we were able to put the force main into operation. A couple days later, after some E. coli testing at the North Shore locations, which showed that E. coli levels, I think the highest that we measured was 32 colonies per 100 milliliters, the EPA standard is 235, so it was well below that. We removed the public notice signs along those access areas and we also let Colchester know that we had done that and that if they were ready, they could remove their signs, so. Okay, just a brief one. Do you know the pipe that you just put in? Cliff. So for everybody who uses the microphone, Charlie has the recording set, so hold it about a foot away from your mouth when we speak, okay, so then he gets the volume correct, thank you. The re-engineered pipe that they put in is about what, 14, 18 inches across? It's 12 inch diameter on the end. And then what's the 1951 that runs the whole gamut? I believe it's 24. So pretty close. Pretty close, and also this is pumping, so it's a little bit different. Actually, dang it, I have a cross section of the pipe because I know some people were concerned about whether the black pipe might burst and it's like the wall on it is about this thick. It's incredibly thick, like I was surprised when somebody left a piece of it in my office and I was like, holy moly, this thing is really thick. So I can't remember if the outside diameter is 12 and the inside is less or if the inside is 12. Good question, though. So we've done two rounds of dye testing, and if you can see this picture, you see this green. So we originally put dye in from the north plant side and the dye popped up here, we used drones to visualize that. So we thought, okay, that's good. And then once we were able to, and because we've been fighting with water clarity too, which is one of the reasons why we haven't been able to get divers in, we then put dye on the other side to make sure we weren't seeing dye pop up, say on the first crossing or somewhere else, which would then let us know we had more of a problem. That side was a little hard because we have to, because there's no water flow, we had to put dye in and then we had to use water to basically flush and get the dye to move through the pipe and we also used a very large amount of dye. I think we put out a notice about that because we didn't want anybody like down at the river or the Delta Park Bridge and then wondering what the heck was going on. The divers have been on standby since the first week. Incidentally, so knowing that we had these sewer crossings, we did twice annual dye testing. So every year we would put dye into the pipe and make sure that it wasn't popping up so that we would know there's no break proactively. We also, in June of this year, had had a diver actually inspect the length of this pipe and I think there was one small one foot area of scour but they reported that they had actually seen worse scour in previous years. So the bottom of a riverbed is active. It's unbearing itself and burying itself all the time. But scour is like the power of the water moving dirt around. So there was a little tiny section of the pipe that was exposed. Excuse me, so the pipe was buried or? The pipe goes through periods of, I think it's typically buried in a couple of feet of river bottom sediment but during certain events, if there's more power to the water, it can wash away parts of the sediments and then it gets reburied. So it's not officially buried. It's not deliberately buried. It's just accidentally covered by sediment, right? I don't know, I think you came in a little bit later but here's a picture of when they installed it which was laying pipe probably on top of an ice and just letting the pipe flow. There's not a way to go in, at least back then and trench and bury a pipe. Well there is now. Oh there is, absolutely there is now but in 1950 there was not. Which is why that first crossing, the modern way that we fixed it in 2005 when it broke was to directionally drill it and that is one of the things we are looking at for this section. Can you just, I'm sorry, but. Of course. Graham, I need the microphone. The material of the pipe is what? I believe, I believe but I'd have to get back to you that it's cast iron. So it's brittle. It's pretty thick cast iron but it's not gonna live forever. It's brittle. It is not gonna live forever. And it has joints, right? So it doesn't take a ton if a joint is not supported for it then to break. Absolutely. I think we have a follow up question, Ray. Is that old pipe, gravity fed? It is gravity fed but by a siphon system so it uses a siphon action because it does go down and then up. As long as stuff's going through it, yeah. Yeah, so but this, the reason why they pursued, the reason why we believe this sewer siphon crossing exists, right, is that they didn't want to pump sewage for decades and decades but we are certainly considering that now. Yeah. Looks like the same area of river where there's a massive amount of erosion occurring all the time. The house collapsed, same area? Yep, no, I mean, that's my, like, ah! It's on the outside meanderbend of a river. It's not a stable place. It is weird if you, and we can go to the map, there's like some other weird hairpin turned right before the bridge. Like the river does a weird thing that you don't see rivers usually do. Frankly, you know, even North Plants is kind of in the way of a cutoff shoot and I don't know that we're gonna be able to address that risk this round but I certainly am leaving a sticky note if you will for whoever's after me to be like, you're gonna need to get that plant out of there soon. So to recap, we don't know if the pipe exists on the second crossing or if it's just severed or if it's damaged. This, this, this, this picture to me and to our engineers tells us that there's a small section missing, not the entire section because what I was worried was gonna happen when we dyed it from the other side. If we saw dye appear on the other bank then that was gonna be like, okay, there's not even a chance for an in-river repair, right? And I don't view in-river repair as like Megan's done and we walk away and we enjoy our lives. I view it as like a band-aid and then what are we gonna do and hopefully get funding for to repair this in a more climate resilient way. Can't they realign it with the foam core and the resins, you know, the three lines? Yep, I think that's possible. I just don't like, I don't think having this infrastructure in a active like geomorphology, like river system is smart. So. To begin with. Yeah, I mean, I think it maybe it was an appropriate, maybe it was appropriate back then, like people's tolerance, right? You were going from sewage dumping in the river every single day. So putting in something like this where there's a little bit of risk. It was still such a much better situation they were in but we don't live in that world now. We know so much more. So. Yep. Let's move on. Move on, okay. I know it's really fascinating so I could talk forever. So divers have been on standby since the first week, but with all the rain that we've been getting the rain, like we were waiting for the water flows to go down so it would be safe. But now the challenge is that the water clarity is such that putting them in there, they're not really going to be able to see anything. They are mobilized or they're scheduled for next Thursday. At this point, I'm kind of telling my engineer, like let's get them in there and see what they can see. And if we end up wasting a little bit of money and they have to come back, like I'm getting a little antsy, I just want to know what we're dealing with. We're going through the pipe. There we go. Small person. If it's feasible and based on the 2005 break, the divers were able to weld an in-river repair to kind of seal that up, right? So one near-term possibility is they do an in-river repair and then what we're thinking is that we would probably leave that the plastic pipe as a backup, but potentially dismantle the pumping, like not have the pumps on site renting because we do have an emergency pump that if something broke again, we could remobilize. That's kind of up in the air, but we think it would be smart to have a backup to a band-aid in the river. We published a request for qualifications on the fourth of this month to hire an external engineering consultant with this type of experience to look at a variety of alternatives, directional drilling, building a permanent modern pump station in that location where the pumps currently are and then burying a force main, a proper force main to a North Plant or at least some of the options. Yep. By force main, you mean a high pressure? It's not super high pressure. I forget what the pressure is on a force main. It's not like a water pipe, but it is a pressurized pipe. Understood, thank you. Yep. You don't know what the pressure is though. I don't know off the top of my head, no. I can certainly find that out for you. I know that it's enough that when they break, sewage surfaces pretty quickly because they are pressurized. I mentioned you had asked, you know, it's working well but not perfectly. So we've had two small volume overflows. I don't have the exact amount, definitely less than 10,000 gallons, maybe less than 5,000 gallons on the fourth and the eighth when we had big storm events. There's two pumps that are operating this. There's a six inch pump and a four inch pump. The four inch is a backup to the six inch. If it needs more juice when we get storm events and there's been some float issues that have been causing, I think the four inch pump to not run in the four, sorry, the six inch pump to not run and the four inch kicks on but it can't keep up with the flow when there's storm events. Today, that's the picture from today. A discharge hose on the downstream side cracked and so sewage was blowing out and that I don't have the total amount but it was larger, it was more in the 100, 150,000 gallons by the time we were able to repair it. Overall we do know that the force main has significantly mitigated the discharge. Yep. You said that happened to you. This morning. And what caused that? It wasn't raining this morning, was it? We don't know. I think they're gonna put a check valve on that we have some ideas about how to fix this particular situation because the pipe itself should be well rated for the pressure. We think maybe it's the kicking of the pump on and on, off and on that is sort of stressing the pipe out. So it could potentially keep happening until you figure that out. I mean, I will say that my directive to my staff, like I am okay with things happening once, happening multiple times. That's when we start to have more serious conversations and my staff are really good. Whenever they report a problem they're almost always working on what they think the solution is. But a system like this, I mean permanent pump stations are very expensive and very robust and have lots of different moving parts and pieces. This is a temporary pumping situation and it's not perfect. If we find out that the in river repair is not feasible, I mean one of the things is we're gonna be looking at how do we make the pumping system more robust? Can we bring in electric pumps and get power over to here? So we're not running diesel all the time. Can we get different size pumps? So we're in a little bit of a, not a holding pattern, but a like we wanna see if the in river repair is possible cause that kind of changes the level of effort of what we're gonna do with this. And I think hopefully in the next two to three weeks we'll have a better idea of that. Winter time operation is possible, but I don't think it's gonna be without its challenges. So I would prefer not to be running this thing in the winter time, but as we were designing it and if we decide that we have to run it through the winter, there's other little tweaks that I think my staff are already thinking about making. Will it be left as a backup? The pipe absolutely will be left as a backup. We're renting these pumps and if we, I think renting them for 12 months is like 80,000 bucks. So if we can send them back, if we feel comfortable with that, knowing that we have at least one six inch pump on hand, then we may decide to do that, but we'll have to do a whole risk benefit analysis, right? So good, like how are we gonna pay for this? Cause that's my stuff. So there has been a disaster declaration. We know that everything up to this point and up to I think what FEMA, and I'm not a FEMA expert, I have not done FEMA stuff before. We've actually briefly had a disaster consultant. I didn't know that disaster consultants existed, but in this day and age, apparently they do. We had them for two weeks for the initial period, just to make sure that we were doing things in the right way that you ratepayers weren't gonna be stuck with like Megan made a $750,000 decision. Yay, but now we have to pay it back. So we had their input early on and we've actually are putting out an RFQ to hire a disaster consultant, not permanently, but for this next foreseeable future to make sure we're leveraging all of the levers that we can to get the feds to pay as much as possible. What we know now is that we will at least get 75% of our costs covered from FEMA. There's the possibility of a 90% grant. So if all of Vermont triggers a certain threshold, which I don't know if anybody, I think it's like 111 million bucks. If all of the money or the damages in Vermont triggers that, then the FEMA kicks in more and they will cover 90%, which sort of crossing fingers for that. And then because of some disaster planning efforts that the city of Burlington has done, hazard mitigation planning, some zoning changes, the state will then cover half of our remaining local match. So we're still gonna have to kick something in, but it's as good of a situation as we could hope for. The big question on hand is, will FEMA pay for what I consider a climate resilient fix? I know they're gonna pay for the band aid in the river, but I wanna know, and I'm talking with agency of natural resources and be having that conversation with FEMA, will they pay for the thing that we all want to do, which is not to have the situation in the river? And so I'm gonna be trying to work whatever angles I can to make that happen, because those climate resilient fixes are gonna be expensive. And as rate payers, I'm a rate payer in the city of Burlington too, like we already have millions and millions of dollars of costs just to keep the plants running, having to deal with more millions to fix this issue is not something that I was planning on, but obviously we'll be having those conversations if it comes down to it. Yep. Throw in a comment. I was personally involved in the state response to Tropical Storm Irene, and I remember this very same question about replacing existing culverts or upgrading for resiliency was like the top topic back then and eventually the state prevailed and it is the success of that decision paid off in this last storm. So I'm just wondering if, oh, okay. I'm putting my fingers crossed. Yes, I'm hoping. Right, so I'm just throw that out there. So if it's helpful to consult with emergency management and the other folks who actually fought that battle with FEMA in 2011 and 12, that might help this conversation go better for Burlington this time around? Yeah, no, I'm also curious if, for instance, if A&R decides that we can't, they won't let us permit this fix or they wouldn't let us permit, say the directional drilling that's popping up in this protected area and they want us to do this other thing, like I'm hoping that we can kind of have those conversations but carefully, because I also don't want them to tell me you got to get that pipe out of the river, but then there's no FEMA money to pay for it and then we as the city have to figure it out. So it's one of those delicate conversations but definitely like in the forefront of my mind in the chess game of how do we make this? I get to deal with a lot of lemons in my role and I try to make as much lemonade as possible whenever I can because that's all you can do otherwise you crawl under your desk and don't come out. There's one other question on the end. Oh, yes, I was just, this is a silly question, but. I'm silly questions, I love questions. Okay, then why does the waste treatment plant is it near river because the outflow, the cleaned up outflow is put back in the river? Is that it? I mean, I believe so wastewater plants are typically at the low points because you're using gravity to bring all of the waste to one location. In many places like where all of our plants are, our places where pre-wastewater treatment, there was a giant pipe that just had all of the city sewage, right? So when they went to go site these things, they're like, where's the most efficient place to put the end of pipe treatment at the end of the pipe? So it's just an accident that they're there. It's gravity, it's, yeah, yes. But so one of the things in the rethinking, so as we look at our three wastewater treatment plants, this other big project that I mentioned that we'll probably be talking to you about more in the fall, we have three wastewater treatment plants. It doesn't make sense long term for a city as small as Burlington to have three plants. And so we are looking at actually converting riverside, the east plant, the one that's on riverside, which is very small into a pump station and actually pumping its flows all the way to main plant, because main plant is where we're putting our phosphorus removal investments. So we're gonna be adding additional treatment to get even more phosphorus out of wastewater. And rather than paying for that to be at multiple different places, we can sort of put all our eggs in the big kid basket. So that's a big piece of our future plan. It costs a little more now, but with every cycle of wastewater treatment plant upgrade, which is usually 20, 25 years, it will be cheaper for the next generation. They won't have to do anything to east plant as a wastewater treatment plant. They just have to upgrade it as a pump station. So if you look at long-term costs, it makes sense for the city to at least be looking at that. And someday I think the same could be said for North Plant. I don't think that we have the money to turn North Plant into a pump station and pump it all the way to main plant this round. But if I was gonna be around for 100 years, that would definitely be in my next couple decade work plan. We have the capacity to handle all of that. We don't at main plant, but we build so with bringing east plant to main plant, we'll be adding capacity. So we would have to keep making main plant either bigger or more efficient so that it could handle these other flows. Not easy. I mean, there's a reason why some of these things have not been done before, I'm guessing, because it hurts me sometimes. Okay, another silly question. I got it at seven o'clock. What happens to the water that you clean up at these water treatment plants? What happens to the water? Yep, so the wastewater treatment plants, all of them they, so riverside discharges to the Winooski River, very just downstream of the salmon hole. And then north plant discharges to the Winooski. Main plant, its water actually goes out a, I think it's 2,500 foot long pipe outside the breakwater. And then it goes to a, it's not just a pipe where it jets out, it actually goes the last, I can't remember how many hundreds of feet has diffusers. So it kind of lets it out in as big an area as possible. The water that comes from wastewater treatment plants, I know it sounds disgusting, and I invite you all to come to a tour. It's extremely clean. It has to have zero bacteria in it. It's tested consistently. There's places in the West that are actually piping their wastewater effluent right to drinking water plants and recycling it in that way. We don't, we're not piped. I've had a beer made out of wastewater effluent. Would it be helpful to explain tertiary treatment? Sure, we don't have, we do not have tertiary treatment right now. It's what, yeah, we have secondary treatment. So it goes through a whole process to remove all of the, all of the organic material and then the water that is leaving the wastewater plant is extremely clear and is also disinfected. They hit it with bleach. So it kills any remaining bacteria that is in there. One last question. So there's no thought, there's no thought as the upper Platsburg Avenue where it goes through that pipe and continues through the pipe. There's no thought of building a station there that would take or a new sewer treatment plant for that that's state of the art and handle half of word seven. I don't, I mean, we can certainly look, they do have very small sewage treatment plants cause it's not a ton of flow. So I don't know that all of the infrastructure that's associated with the full wastewater treatment process makes sense at that location, how much area we have. But what we do think is very much on the table and will be evaluated by our engineer is a pump station. So a formal version with backup tanks and storage so that even when a pump dies, you know, there's a place for the sewage to collect so that you aren't having discharges. We have 25 pump stations all around the city. We don't have one that handles the 250, we'll have many thousands, hundreds of thousands of gallons so it would be a bigger pump station but it's what we're thinking about doing for East Plant so we will definitely be looking at doing it here. Is that a pump station on Platsburg Avenue? No, no, it's right now it's a temporary pump station. There's a little structure that's been there. I'm just thinking. There is the existing structure there is a grit chamber so I think they built something that kind of collects the gunk so that not as much gunk would go through the pipe and potentially clog it because there's no way to clean it or inspect it. So that gets cleaned out at the little structure, okay. Yeah, but there was no pumping, there was no pumps there, only the pumps that we have now. I kind of like separating the storm water from the sewage. Now I was curious, we do the storm water all the time I think from what I've heard, we process our storm water through our sewage treatment plants. How much of stuff are we taking out of the storm waters? I know there's some contaminants. So in the 1990s, they pursued sort of all of the easy storm sewer separation throughout the New North and in the downtown core. And when they did that, so there used to be 11 combined sewer overflows and when I've done research in the past, back in those days about a, the estimate is about 170 million gallons of combined sewer overflow. We're going in each year to the Burlington Harbor, right? Once they closed all of those off and then they increased the capacity of the largest main plant and they actually put in a combined sewer treatment system. So when they get the excess storm flows, it goes through a separate process and then it also gets disinfected that greatly helped. There's not, I'm not saying there's zero opportunities for storm sewer separation remaining, but they are fewer and further between. The other issue that we struggle with as water quality folks is that storm water is also nasty. It's just nasty in a different way. And it's nasty like over the course of the year, it's a long-term chronic pollution where like a combined sewer overflow is a very acute issue where you're discharging bacteria into the water. But I mean, if anybody's looked at a street, like the stuff that's in storm water is disgusting in any of the places that we separated storm sewers, those get zero treatment. So it's not like a, it's not perfectly black and white to just separate all the storm sewers, even though there are days, trust me, where I wish I worked in a community where they had separated sewers, because it is challenging. Because I don't know if that answers your question or not. Kind of does, but are there systems that treat storm water more efficiently than the sewage treatment plant? I'm not aware of any end-of-pipe storm water treatment systems. I don't know, Julie, have you ever come across those? We've been focusing all of our storm water treatment efforts on capturing the storm water at its source. So throughout the Old North End, one of the ways we greatly reduced the frequency of combined sewer overflows from the CSO points that are off of Manhattan Drive was to let the storm water go into the ground. So we built infiltration systems underneath the roadway. So it goes into the, catch basins goes in there instead of going into the combined sewer pipe and that dropped our frequency. So that's been our main approach. There isn't, there's no easy place that I can think of and the amount of water that hits it and being able to treat it because the pollutant concentrations are fairly low. Like it's cleaner, if you take a glass of storm water, it's certainly cleaner than a glass of sewage. It's just the problem is that you get so much more of the storm water that on balance the junk that's inside kind of adds up from like a poundage perspective. I don't know if I'm, it's load. So you can have, if you have a high concentration but a small volume that can have a certain load. And if I have something that has a lower concentration but a lot of volume, it can have more pounds of pollution in it than this other thing. Yeah. Good spot to move on. I'm here all night, well not all night but we got like, we got a lot of time. I know I made an eight o'clock bargain with you. Well, I don't have my edit. That was when I had to bring my kids. Now I don't have to bring my kids. Somebody had asked about drinking water impacts. We were certainly monitoring our raw water for evidence of turbidity. So we can look at the cloudiness of the water that's coming in cause that's kind of a surrogate for like if we're getting influenced by not so much our sewage issue but just the Winooski River and we didn't see that during this time period. What's interesting is, was it last week? I think it was last week. We actually saw higher raw water turbidities than we have ever really seen which we think was from the southern part of Vermont, rainfall, getting washed into the lake and then the lake generally flows north. And so we were seeing and having to, having to fight a little bit with our filtration process to make sure it was taking out that material. Had we gotten a weird weather pattern where we got winds out of the north when the Winooski was flowing like she was flowing that would have not been fun cause it would have pushed the flows this way. I've seen that happen like once or twice in my time since I've taken over just a weird like spring runoff and then we get a north wind but we have 24 seven operators that though a drinking water plant, your water comes from the drinking water plant which is next to the Coast Guard Station and the Moran plant. The pipe is I think 4,200 feet offshore and about 30 feet below the surface of the water. So it's not in super deep water but it is offshore and kind of out where things are more diluted I guess. But we didn't, we didn't see, we were monitoring for it so we didn't see any changes in drinking water quality. A stupid question. Y'all gotta stop thinking it, all questions are good. Does sewage float or sink? So are drinking waters coming from down here? Does it all? I mean honestly I think by the time it's come out the Winooski with the, if you saw the Winooski, the amount of water it's like getting pushed way out into the lake and is then circulating. I don't know, I mean have you seen sewage floats? So I can tell you, so I'm the Lake Champlain Lakekeeper for the Conservation Law Foundation and one of my jobs is to take the boat, the Lakekeeper boat and I was traveling the plume as it was coming out of the Winooski and documenting it and it actually created a wall so you could see a sediment set up from the surface all the way down. We were running depending on the day in 10 feet to 18 feet of water and there was a straight shot of a plume so there's a density profile if you want that sort of set up through the whole water column that I could see. So the answer is yes it does all of those things and again it depends on how much water is coming out and how it's spreading out and up and where it was going and we were watching that plume move into the lake. You said you were going to hire an engineer to look at the pipe where it's broken in the river. Well our first thing is to get the divers in because they're the ones who would weld like if they can look at it and be like oh we could weld a fix for that, right? That's going to happen. If it's more complicated then we'll probably have this engineer that we're hiring and or our city engineers work with them to come up with the solution and then separately we're hiring a design engineer to basically look at all these creative ideas that we've been talking about like do we directionally drill? Do we create a temporary, sorry a permanent pump station and force main? Maybe they'll come up with something else that they have thought of, yep. Looking at the shape of the river there they got the metal bulkheads in there so I was wondering if the engineer would take in consideration that the hydraulics getting pushed off there are shifting quickly to the south shore then they come around to the pumping state or the sewage treatment plant so those turbulence are eating that bank away just from that bulkhead. Yes, yep. That's built there for a look out it's nice and everything. So that again that was one of the, we believe that when they did that on the other side when Colchester did that on the other side of the river is potentially what contributed to the first one breaking in 2005 because it was fine. It didn't break in a crazy storm event that broke in kind of typical high flows but it broke after there had been some bank armoring work. Makes sense to me. Yeah, I mean I think unfortunately in the old days we thought we could just manhandle mother nature and she's telling us to go do something else and that she's got more power so we try to stay away from armoring if we can. Megan, can I ask you? Megan, do you have some additional slides? I don't. Okay. Just questions. All right. Just a question about, so what's the conversation with Colchester right now? Like what's going on with their being affected as well and how is that conversation happening and are they having sort of NPA meetings as well? Are you presenting to them? I have not presented to them. This isn't the first time other than the social media and other lots of, I think we've done a good job at least on the Burlington side of the public outreach. We have been feeding them information and certainly when we were having the pump float issues I wrote an email to them explaining to them why we weren't suggesting that they post their beaches and showing them a map of the one mile and asking if they had any questions because certainly if they wanted our signs to post somewhere, I'd be happy to give them to them. So we've been in, I won't say constant communication but definitely in the loop. I don't know if we did a great job and like the first day or two other than just letting them know but it's been a little bit more of an open conversation. Yeah, just sort of follow up. And is that bend privately owned land in Colchester or publicly owned land that that is pipe exists in? The Half Moon Cove. The Half Moon Cove, yeah. I haven't even had time to figure out like do we even have an eat? Like there's so much stuff that I've inherited where I have pipes that when I go to try to fix it, I don't have a piece of paper saying that I have the right to fix it which is not a great situation to be in. So we have not looked into all of that. I know the communication has been very good from you people because I know people live on Broad Lake Road in Colchester which is the point where the flow of the water goes. And I know that the police went door to door to tell them about what was going on and warned them not to go in the water. So you guys did an excellent job of that. I mean, they made the choice to have their place do that which was great because I don't think, I don't know what their usership is of the BTV of the alert system that we try to leverage a lot here. It's, we use that when there's these types of situations because it gets the message out to people who have signed up, you do have to sign up for it, but. Megan, I have a question if we can sort of circle back to. You know, you focused a lot on managing this particular, you know, event but a little earlier you talked about a lot of your future planning prospects. So, you know, in terms of thinking about having you coming back to the community, what would you say would be a good time frame for kind of a future engineering summary? Cause, you know, you've got the divers coming and you've got, you know, you're looking for consultants and so when do you think would be a good time to talk about having you come back for a future planning recap? And. Yeah, I guess I don't know. And I guess I shouldn't put you on the spot for a time commitment now, but just that would be something we would be very interested in having you do when some of the dust settles and you have a picture of what your future planning looks like. Yes, I was just having an internal panic because winter is coming, you know, how things move in the city sometimes is slower, although the administration has been fairly committed to helping us move faster, like sometimes approving contracts that usually otherwise would have to go through Board of Finance before we sign something. So I'm imagining something like that will be at play, but the RFQs come back, I think, September 1st, and I think we'll be turning them around pretty darn quickly. Now, when we have sort of what the alternatives are and the initial analysis, I'm hoping from a winter standpoint, maybe October and then certainly by then we should have gotten the divers in by then and maybe we'll be able to celebrate the fact that we have it in river repair. Okay, yeah, I was thinking something like is October kind of a reasonable potential that we can talk about for future meeting topics. I think so, yeah, it's my birthday month, so I don't have to. We'll make you a cake. There we go, it's Halloween, we'll lure you with a birthday cake. So I have a question. I understood you to say that we would see the break as if it was hit by a car tumbling down the river. I believe that would be your words. So I was expecting to see a slide of that break. Do we not know anything about the actual break? The only thing we know about the break is what we know from the dye test. You can't see, I don't know if somebody can move the. So another question is why not use cameras? I assume it's because there's no visibility so you're relying on divers actually tactile touching the pipe and feeling the break, is that correct? Yes, and hopefully having enough water clarity that they can see and probably grab some video for us. Yeah, we work with divers to inspect our discharge pipe for main plant to inspect our intake pipe for the drinking water plant. Having this infrastructure in deep water is a little challenging. And they're the type of diver that also can do repair. So some of the diffuser elbows had popped off of the main plant diffuser pipe and so was it the spring? One of their projects was to go and reinstall those. So they're welding type divers who can fix things that are underwater, which I still embathled about sometimes, but. Have they checked them for zebra mussels lately? They, we check the water intake. So there's a screen on the outside of the water pipe and the diver checks the pipe and then also like removes the zebra mussels from the screen. So they have experienced issues with. Oh, absolutely. No, if we didn't have the diver doing that to our raw water line, it would clog. Yeah, and we also use a chemical called earth tech which kills the zebra mussel larvae so that if they get in the pipe they don't set up in the inside of the pipe. I believe it's, I think it's copper based. So Graham, I want to check back. Did you started asking a question about the specific location of the break and then jumped to something else? So did you get an answer to that question? Oh, I was curious about the actual break. What is it? I would, I'm kind of disappointed that we still don't know anything about that break. Is it world of all or is it not? Is it what? Is it fixable? I am also like, I could call Steve Roy now and he could tell you what I ask him every morning which is can we get the divers in there? And so today, as he's done many days, he's gone down to the river, he's collected, taken a picture of the water, sent it to the divers and the divers are sort of saying like we can go in but we're probably not going to be able to see it. I mean, they're the same divers that inspect the pipe so they're very familiar with it. Regardless of all that, we've scheduled them for next Thursday because I want to give it a shot. Okay, thank you. But the thing we do know, which I was showing the picture is with the dye testing, we do know where it is which is a good part of the game versus like not even know, you know, them having to creepy crawl across the entire thing to try to figure out where the break is. So it's in the best location it can be from like an accessibility standpoint. You know, these are sections of pipe with joints and so it could be that the joint has just come on loose. It could be that something hit it and you know, punctured the pipe. We don't know the nature of the break. The fact that it's broken and it looks like the dye is coming from a fairly defined area I think is in the plus category and that it should be a easier fix than if it was multiple sections because that gets more problematic. Can we talk about the pipe that's above ground now, the repair pipe and why some people's roads and yards that have never flooded and didn't flood for the storm but are now flooding? Yeah, so we've been looking into that and I don't know if you were the one that sent the question, have you filed an insurance claim or not for somebody? We're from Riverview. Yeah, we haven't filed that insurance claim because we were hoping, yeah, sorry. Sorry, we were just hoping that it would get fixed. So the issue from what I know right now is that, because I know one of the things you were talking about is that your road did fine during the storm but then it didn't, the rains that we were having afterwards were very intense and we were seeing damage and flooding in a lot of areas of town. Thus far, like when my folks have gone out there, they're not seeing exactly how the pipe made it happen. But I think- I don't think it was the pipe. I think the pipe being there but I think this way they put it back together. There used to be a lip up there that would kind of divert the water and there's no lip now. And then also where the pipe is going down underground, it's kind of creating like a funnel on both sides. So really the water has nothing, it's just a funnel going right down our road. Okay. So, and we can't really file an insurance claim because it's four houses and none of us own that road. Who owns it? Is that, it's one of those situations? Yeah, it's like a green space thing with- Okay. We should still figure out how to file a claim because that's the usual process and then the insurance company kind of like does the investigation and then it takes your information, takes our information and then comes to it. But- This is not a C-1 thing. I have to- It's the Rivers Edge Condo Association owns the road and they don't ever see it, come down it, work on it. We've had, the homeowners have had to put money into it. I appreciate the challenge and I appreciate the additional details because like I said, we went out and just, when we eyeballed it as an initial thing, it wasn't apparent and we know, we know from some other folks who are in the area that like during that second storm events, the catch basins were getting overwhelmed. Like there was flooding that was ponding up in the street which maybe doesn't usually pond. But the fact, if you had a lip there before, that would have, maybe it wouldn't have captured all of it but it might have helped. So I can- I don't know if there's any drains up there on Northview. There's one drain. And I heard that that drain basically, it couldn't handle the rain that was coming down on some of those, because we've been getting these intense rainfall events on saturated soils, which is just the whole watershed is acting like a parking lot instead of soaking up a little bit. So every rainstorm we get, I'm like, I don't really sleep when this happens when I hear the pitter-patter on my roof, unfortunately. Let me, I think I have- Yeah, you have my information. So let me follow up and give this particular information to the person who was kind of looking at it as a- And then also what Cheryl mentioned earlier about, we're right on the river and like her backyard is flooded. And so she's worried about the contamination and you had mentioned possibly getting that tested. So you are, you're talking about flood, it's flooded from the river. I see, not that the- It took my trees. No, I know. My beautiful trees? I guess I don't, Julie, do you know, I mean, sort of outside my area of, is there any testing that people have been doing who like live along rivers because of the contamination that has come down the river, like even separate from our sewage? Like other than- That's a great question. There are- Do any quality tests? I do know the Ag Department has been doing field soil testing, but that's typically on agricultural lands to understand what the impact of the floodwaters are on replanting and growing. But I don't know about each individual property owners. Cause I thought that you were saying that you were adjacent to the fountain of raw sewage that was happening today. Well, I was wondering if it was coming onto my land when it was flooding like that. I mean, it's going into the river and then the river has contamination from that plus anything else that's happening upstream. But I don't know what sort of testing, like when we have- The Department of Health, Rudy? I'm having some familiarity with that. I'm gonna say I doubt the Department of Health is the right place to go because their primary focus is on drinking water. Testing that they do at their lab. I'm wondering if there's a- Megan, if you know, does the Agency of Natural Resources Lab do any degree of public testing, private water testing? They do, but that's the whole thing is it's like you're worried that, say even when the floodwaters recede, you've got soil and lawn there, is it contaminated with egg and bacteria? My family came up from Maryland. They wouldn't even walk out to the backyard. That's terrible. I have kids too and a lot of my decision-making is based on like I want other parents and people to know stuff so that they can make decisions for their kiddos or for people with compromised immune systems because a lot of people can tolerate some level of contamination, but if you're a kid or somebody who's got health issues, it can be very dangerous. They and them, I don't want my cats getting sick either. Yeah, so I don't know the answer to that question and I think that's something that you can imagine like the Montpelier, like the floodwaters were everywhere and the floodwaters everywhere had, I don't, you've been documenting the impact. There was sewage, oil, petroleum, nasty stuff everywhere. Okay, you name it. Everything, chemicals. Everything, every yuck that we've created has. Any chemical in anybody's garage that was flooded, bug killers, weed killers, you name it. It's everywhere. I don't have very much money, so I can't go around and swim a lot. No, I know, I will, I mean, I can think about it and do some poking and I mean, I think that's a great. I can connect too. Yeah, like if you have some resources, because I think it's a very valid question. That's a great question. On resiliency, floods happen a lot on farmland. I don't know if it's possible, but design a test that we could just give them, they could test themselves, something simple. Yeah, I mean, I think the department of Ag is overseeing that whole effort of like, when a farm field can go back into service. That is definitely something I think about as somebody who likes to eat local food, but. Such at the interval farms. Yeah, I know that they've been involved. They're doing some level of testing. Yeah, I'm sure. What else, anything else? Somebody had asked about waterfowl and aquatic species impacts, monitoring mitigation. I mean, I think Julie Lakekeeper, I don't know if that's included in your sort of analysis, the impacts to aquatic life of an event like this. It's not something we've been necessarily looking at. I can talk broadly. And there's been a lot of amazing articles written in VT Digger, if you want to know more about it, but a lot of wildlife in streams have been dislocated and relocated just like a lot of people and all of those cars. So fish, macro invertebrates, the little critters that the fish like to eat, the little cute salamanders and all the little reptiles and other amphibians that live in streams have lost their homes and they don't have FEMA and the only help they get are from us figuring out ways to not keep flooding their homes out. So we actually caused the problem for them. So we need to fix that. Some populations like beavers, they say, are gonna be, beavers are one of the best wetland builders in the world. We can't get a better environmental engineering crew out there and they can help us with climate change and flood resilience that again, we have also caused the problem. And turtles also, some populations may actually find new neighbors downstream. So it's not a complete loss, but it's not ideal. Imagine waking up one day and your entire world has completely changed and you don't know where your girlfriend is and you don't know where your brother is and you don't know where anybody else is and you're trying to make your living as a turtle or another species and you have no idea what to do there. I saw, I also monitor out Law Island and I've seen more turtles on all of the driftwood. So they're enjoying a lot of the driftwood in the lake to sun themselves, but I'm not sure if those populations have never been there before or if they're just popping out more. But I did have a question, I don't know, maybe you could answer it and talk a little bit more about your climate resilience planning for this project and then sort of a quick scope on how this sort of fits into the bigger picture for what Burlington and the community needs to do to be more climate resilient because this is gonna just keep happening. Yeah, definitely for the upgrade, like the wastewater treatment plant upgrades, having an eye to that because I don't think that we're gonna move North Plant, making sure that it is as resilient as possible given its location, making sure that future flows that we're designing for are taking into account the fact that we're getting more and more frequent rain events, more for main plant than for the other smaller plants. I mean, the state has adjusted the size of storm events and we use all of the new rainfall data that's out of the North, was it Northeast Climate Center? So we're keeping up as quickly as we can, but I think unfortunately the rainfall patterns are changing faster than it takes those folks to produce the new engineering design storms that we often use when we're doing this type of stuff. I'll be honest, I feel like I'm chasing the problem, like it's not fully defined because it's moving so fast, it's not like here's the problem and this is what we need to do, it's like we designed that and then the next year it's worse, so it's a little... Like what Graham was saying, we need to think about why are, or do we continue to keep letting our wastewater plants be in floodplains? Do we look at how rivers need to move and that floodplain area needs to be not have houses in it and not have infrastructure? So what do we need to do, big picture to move forward and how do we get everybody on board? And again, how do we stop the water from hitting our streets and flowing faster and stronger and hotter and more polluted down the drain into the storms? It takes everybody? Yeah, so that's sort of the thing we need to get on that together. It's very, people like to point at the farmers and the farmers like to point at the cities and the wastewater treatment plants, but the fact of the matter is that, so we have a plan, the Lake Champlain TMDL, the phosphorus that's driving the cyanobacteria, Burlington has a plan for what we're going to do to meet the obligation, the budget that's been given to us by the state, but it's not gonna do diddly squat. If the rest of Vermont doesn't do it, we will still have cyanobacteria blooms because it's a big bathtub. So even though we've turned off our faucet, there's still gonna be phosphorus coming through. I'm freaked out about the fact that I think it's 130% of all of the phosphorus that was discharged last year came through the Winooski or the watershed in this one event. So like, giants amounts of fertilizer have been put into the lake. And so I hope that next year is not as hot because that it will be the one way in which we won't have blooms. We just got like big old Miracle Grow tossed in there. We all have to do something. We have a program on our website called Blue, which is residential folks can contact their sign up. Somebody comes to your house, looks at your water quality practices and decides, hey, if you just turned your downspout, like your gutter, which right now drains to your driveway and drains your entire roof water onto your driveway, which then connects with our storm sewer system. Hey, if you just turn that downspout over to your grass, you've now reconnected the water, the rain water with where it wants to be, which is the earth, right? Rain, it's been raining for a long time. Now, obviously we're getting more rain, but rain is not a problem except when we don't allow it to connect with its hydrologic cycle, which is generally soaking in to the landscape, going into groundwater and then slowly getting to these streams instead of like, shup, shup, shup, shup, shup, shup, everything's hitting all at the same time. So I know in my house in the old North Inn, which is easy because it's on 65 feet of sand. It's great soil. It's the only place I would live because of the sand. Like none of our storm water leaves our property. I challenge everybody in Burlington to see how, like up to what size storm event could you make it that nothing leaves your property and contributes to the river that is in the road, which contributes to the river that's in the sewer, all of that stuff. Every little bit counts when we're in this type of a battle. I just want to sort of add a comment about sort of cautioning the too liberal, the use of the word fertilizer in this situation because the majority of the phosphorus load that got flushed into the lake has been, yeah, is a residual river sediment that took years to get there in the first place. And then sort of the, so yeah. And then of course the stream bank erosion is actually the largest influence of phosphorus loading in the lake and the rivers as opposed to strict surface water runoff. So, we need to keep in mind the fact of how much of a residual load is sitting in the rivers and streams that the weather moves that is not current runoff events. They do take into account in the models that they have. I mean, the challenges is like that's the result of the government in the early years paying farmers to put orthophosphate, like more phosphorus, or at least that's what my understanding is, so a lot of it has runoff. And then now, even though they've stopped that on the farms, anytime you have runoff from your lawns and all these other places, like an urban area, like leaves which have nutrients in them. If there was in a forest, the leaves don't go into the pipe and get into the river quickly. They get stuck on the landscape, right? You're not having that shedding of load all of the time. But in a urban setting, everything's slick and fast and it doesn't take much for a pollutant to get into. It's much easier for a pollutant to get into the river than it would in a natural setting. I got into this whole field because I love that rivers and watersheds, like you can, I could have blinders on and not actually look at the land use of a watershed, not know that there's farms or whatever, but if you're in, sitting in the river, you can tell, right? It speaks the truth. You can't hide when you're in the river what's going on in the landscape and what poor decisions humans might be making, so. Okay, right, and then we're gonna wrap it up. River a lot. You must have seen me floating on the river a lot. I love white water. But I do have an answer to one of her questions, Burlington, and I'm curious on how this has worked out. Burlington has done a parking lot with Pervious Service, Blacktop. Yeah, of course, Asphalt, straight at my office. Now, that's one of our resilient ideas. I was wondering how that's worked out. It's been a couple of years now. Yeah, it's working pretty well. Whenever it rains, I look at it and there's no puddles forming. The challenge of it is it's resilient to like car wheels turning. So when you go to that parking lot, there's the parking lot that's near the skate park and near where our office is and near where the Coast Guard is. That whole parking lot has made a porous asphalt. It is by far better than some of our previous installations. But it doesn't look as clean. I'm fine with it, but it has, they call it ravelling, so it has little bits and pieces of it. And of course, humans like things. I mean, people are sealing their asphalt all the time so that it looks black and beautiful. I don't entirely understand it, so that's probably gonna be one of the challenges until engineers can figure out how to make it kinda look like the other stuff. I don't know if it's gonna be fully adopted. Also, we're at that cusp where there's still not that many people using it and therefore not that many people making it. We had to move Heaven and Earth to get the asphalt company to make it and make it in the right way to get it to be laid down. I think it's going to be anything in the future. More and more people will be calling for it and therefore then there'll be a market and so on and so forth, but we're still at that early stage and I just worry though with how quickly things are moving, like I wish we had started 10, 15 years ago. I got one thing to say, I want to say thank you. You're welcome. Thank you all. Can I just ask one more quick question? Sorry, Nancy, I didn't want to walk on that. We were asked in the New North end to limit our wastewater, so limit our washing, doing all that kind of stuff. Just curious how many people did that? Was there an impact? Any data about what happened? I don't, we didn't have flow meter. We now have a flow meter in the manhole that's above the pumping station, but we weren't able to mobilize that and it was just a request because it didn't hurt and we knew that if we could have a little less water, particularly during those peak hours, that it would be helpful. It's interesting, we've thought about doing that or setting up a program, particularly for like one of our more active combined sewer overflows Pine Street in theory. I think it's Michigan does something like that, that when it's raining, they send out a reminder to people, basically save the space in the pipe because every gallon you don't put in the pipe is a gallon of storm water that can be there and not push out a gallon of sewage. So it's something we may play around with more in the future. I mean, you all got that message. Who here conserved? Good. I mean, we take a lot for granted, right? We can do our laundry whenever we want, but doing laundry and using water between those hours of six and eight on both ends, that's when the system is the most taxed. So if you get a rain event during a peak hour, the diurnal peaks, it bumps everything up big time. So can we circle back to how long the black pipe is gonna be above ground and about fixing people's yards and stuff. And also driving on Platspore Avenue where they kind of have some cement things to hold it in place. And then it cuts across and it's kind of like free hanging there. And it looks to me like it's eroding underneath it where because we've had more rainstorms. Do you know the spot I'm talking about? Yes, I've driven by it a couple of times. I haven't seen the erosion, but as it goes off of the grass with the concrete thrust blocks and then goes underneath them. Yeah, and then it comes back into that. It does look like it's sagging a little bit right there. Yeah, the pipe's fine, because it's like, as I said, so thick, but if there's an erosion issue happening, we don't wanna... Driving by it, it looks like it's in me, but... Okay, well, we have people who can go out there and just take a look and make sure that we're not, we always try to not cause a worse problem with the problem that we're trying to fix, but sometimes it seems to happen. So eventually this is all gonna, before winter, it'll all go away? I don't, I don't, I can't promise anything. I don't think, I think that that pipe is going to be there over the winter. It won't freeze? I think hopefully we're gonna have an in-river repair, which means that the pipe won't have to be active. It would be there in the backup in case an in-river bandaid failed, so that we wouldn't have to rebuild the whole thing from scratch. But that's kind of what I'm thinking, because any bigger repair is like a 12, 18 month thing, so, I mean, who knows, but I think it would be wise of us to at least have a plan on having it there for a full 12 months. Why not? Well, I'm hoping we can revisit that when Megan comes back to see us in October. That's right, all right. I'm on the hook. Okay, I... Free and dairy, so, you know, there's beans and cakes that's like $35. We're used to cooking for our daughter, so, okay, it's a deal. All right, I think this is a great place for us to wrap up. Megan, I really appreciate all your this flood of information that you gave us today, but... Enjoy a good water pun. Yeah, right, no, it's a great presentation. Thank you for all the information, and I really appreciate everybody coming out this evening, and the NPA here at New North End will resume normal operations in September, so we will see you the fourth Wednesday of September for our regular NPA meeting. Thank you very much. Thank you.