Things are progressing well as the Choctaw Utilities board continues to move forward with plans to construct our new water plant next year. We are working with the EPA to get final funding approval and continue to work on the details of our new water plant. We hope to give everyone an update at our quarterly general meeting on October 30. This meeting will be held at the lodge at 7:00 pm.
Maintenance and testing will be performed over the next two weeks (October 2-10) at the Choctaw Utilities plant and well field. As part of our plant replacement efforts, we are upgrading our well field capacity from 400k gallons per day to 550k gallons per day. This capacity increase was recommended by the EPA. To support this increase, we will be “pump testing” our underground aquifer to ensure it can support this extra capacity.
We anticipate the test on well #1 well to take 3-4 days. Once well #1 is tested, we will perform the same test on well #2. Testing on well #3 was done previously and those results were reported to the EPA. Upon completion of the pump tests, we will also inspect the well casings. During these tests you should not experience any service interruptions.
These tests are required by the EPA and results of these tests will be included in our General Plan that we are submitting to the EPA. Following EPA approval of our General Plan, we will move into the final engineering stage and prepare bids for our new plant. Our goal is to complete engineering / bid specs in the next few months and move the project out for bid by early 2018. Following the bid process, we intend to select our contractor and hope to begin the construction process sometime late spring/early summer 2018.
Understand that this is a very fluid process and these dates are subject to change.
We will be posting monthly updates on our website as the project progresses.