Mebane plans Fieldstone pump station upgrade to boost capacity and redundancy by 2027

Kyle Smith, Mebane’s public utilities director, outlined a design–build upgrade to the Fieldstone pump station that the city says will increase capacity and add redundancy to handle projected growth.

“We're operating at roughly 475,000 gallons a day,” Smith said, and the station is running at about 75% of its current capacity. He said projected flows could reach roughly 775,000 gallons per day in the near future, and the city needs the upgrades in place by December 2027 to accommodate that demand.

Smith said the city will use a design–build delivery and contract with Crowder Construction, which will use McGill as its engineers, to design and construct the work with input from city staff. “We're going to be upgrading the station to provide a new wet well for additional storage, and make this a triplex station,” he said, describing a conversion from the existing duplex (two-pump) configuration to a triplex (three pumps). The upgrade also calls for using the existing wet well as additional storage and installing a diesel backup pump there to provide emergency pumping capacity.

The director outlined technical and resilience features that will be added or retained. The station’s control panel uses Contegra controls and includes main power disconnects, a transformer, indicator lights, and manual/auto switches; the site has a backup generator, and Smith said the new configuration will include a generator that serves the control panel plus the diesel backup pump to assist during outages. He also described a valve vault with isolation and check valves to prevent backflow and an emergency bypass connection that allows a portable bypass pump to connect directly to the force main if both pumps are lost. Smith described an odor control tank where chemicals are injected into the sewer flow to reduce odors before the flow reaches the treatment plant.

Smith placed the Fieldstone project in system context: the city operates about 21 large duplex and triplex pump stations, some of which date to the 1970s; Fieldstone itself is roughly 25 years old and due for replacement or upgrade. He said the upgraded station would have capacity “roughly 1.5 meg gallons a day” (stated elsewhere in the briefing as 1,500,000 gallons a day) and that the station pumps directly to the city’s wastewater treatment plant, which the transcript referred to as “WERF” and which is also being upgraded.

The briefing did not specify funding sources, total project cost, or final construction schedule beyond the target of having upgrades in place by December 2027. According to Smith, the city chose a design–build contracting approach to streamline design and construction with a single contractor–engineer team. The next procedural step described in the briefing is procurement and contracting with the named team; no formal council vote, funding approval, or timeline milestones were presented in the transcript.

The briefing closed with Smith saying the upgrade would provide capacity and resilience for future growth in Mebane.