Fairhope hears $40M phased plan to modernize wastewater plant, prioritize redundancy
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Summary
Krebs Engineering briefed the Fairhope City Council on Phase 2 improvements to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, proposing phased upgrades to add redundancy and raise average-day capacity toward 6–8 MGD; the firm estimated capital costs near $40 million and said the plan avoids a costly greenfield plant.
Caleb Leach of Krebs Engineering presented a Phase 2 plan to upgrade Fairhope’s wastewater treatment plant, emphasizing redundancy and reuse of the existing site. The firm told the City Council on Feb. 9 that the plant’s current average daily flow is about 2.2 million gallons per day (MGD) with peak flows to roughly 10 MGD during storms, and that the proposed work would increase average treatment capacity toward 6 MGD in the near term with room to reach about 8 MGD in the future.
The project seeks to add redundancy to systems that currently lack bypasses or spare channels, Leach said. He described recent Headworks improvements that added a second screen and larger influent piping and called for a new blower and electrical building, a fixed-grid fine-bubble aeration system, rehabilitation and a third secondary clarifier, and cloth-disc tertiary filters to replace older proprietary "fuzzy" filters. "You're going from 15 motors to 3," Leach said, noting that consolidation into enclosed blowers would reduce noise and maintenance burdens.
Leach said the design would reuse much of the existing site — converting some digesters to aeration basins and building a new solids-handling building with odor control — and that a secondary outfall and higher UV structure would reduce flood vulnerability at the disinfection building. He told the council the plan is nonproprietary (multiple manufacturers can bid components) and can be phased so the plant remains in operation during construction.
Councilmembers pressed engineers on the balance between building redundancy and increasing capacity and whether additional investment in reducing infiltration would yield a better cost-benefit than added treatment. Leach estimated roughly two-thirds of the proposed scope (65–70%) is redundancy for maintenance and permit compliance; he cautioned that a second greenfield plant would likely be far more expensive, saying an off-site plant would "probably be" on the order of $100 million. Staff and some council members also asked for clearer testing and verification of peaking factors and more comparison data before committing to full scope.
The council did not vote on the engineering plan that night. Staff and councilmembers asked Krebs Engineering to return with additional details, refined cost estimates, and phasing options that would describe incremental steps, contingency plans for contractor prequalification and clearer metrics for when the city would move beyond the near-term 6 MGD footprint.
