Pocahontas PSD Gets Good News About Water Project Money

Snowshoe, WV – Randy Watson from Thrasher Engineering gave the Pocahontas County Public Service District board some good news during their monthly meeting this past Tuesday night. There is a substantial amount of money left over from the project designed to reduce water loss in Bartow, Frank and Durbin in northern Pocahontas County. Watson says the project has been very successful.

“I’ve estimated that we are complete with the job,” he says. “We started out roughly 185,000 gallons of water being produced a day, we’re down to around 63,000 – 65,000 gallons a day. In my opinion I think it was a pretty successful project, and on top of that I think we’ve got somewhere in the neighborhood of approximately $140,000.00 still remaining.”

Prior to this project, the water system had well over 50% losses due to leaks in the old pipes. Watson suggests three things the PSD should do with the remaining funds. The first is to paint the water tank.

“I have three estimates that I got from companies to paint your water tank,” says Watson. “One was Southern Corrosion out of North Carolina. They actually came up and looked at your tank, and their quote was approximately $54,000.00. The other two companies were Welding Inc. out of Charleston and Eastern Tank and Steel out of Princeton, West Virginia. Neither one of those two companies came up to look at it, but both gave us a price in the neighborhood of right at $85,000.00.”

“That price would still be marked up by your contractor; he’ll mark it up to put it on a change order. So I would anticipate that markup would be in the neighborhood of 15%, so you’d be looking at approximately $62,000.00 to paint that Bartow tank.”

Additionally Watson suggests using $25,000.00 of the remaining funds to put fencing around both the water tank and the Durbin water treatment plant to meet a requirement of the health dept. He also suggests purchasing new water meters.

“You can get a touch read meter system which should result in your operations and maintenance costs even going down a little more, with your meter reading time would be reduced,” says Watson. “It also limits error and points out discrepancies in billing to you. That price is approximately $46,500.00.”

“If you would do these three things out of the $140,000.00, you’d still have about a balance of $6500.00.”

PSD member David Litsey says he’d like to proceed with painting the tank and the fencing. Watson says although he’s had a difficult time getting quotes for the fencing job, he anticipates that it wouldn’t cost more than $25,000.00, and possibly much less. Water plant manager Ricky Barkley says the last quote they got on the fencing job was $12,000.00 in 2006.

Barkley also suggests purchasing a backup generator. Litsey made the following motion.

“Affirmatively do the tank, reserve $25,000.00 for the fence, proceed with getting bids for touch-read meters for $46,500.00, and reserve the residual for a generator,” says Litsey.

The motion passed unanimously. Watson also gave the board a preliminary look at a proposed extension of a water line south of Bartow down to Salisbury Road. The PSD Board agreed to add this to a future meeting agenda.

In other business, several people spoke during the public comment period, both in favor of and opposed to the David Rigby engineering plan for the needed sewer upgrades at Snowshoe. PSD Chairman Tom Shipley says Rigby anticipates making his preliminary engineering report publicly available towards the end of September. He is required to submit that plan to the West Virginia Dept of Environmental Protection and the West Virginia Public Service Commission for approval before proceeding further.