Sewer upgrade work to affect East Norris Road work begins amid sewer upgrades
This sign near the beginning of East Norris Road just off Andersonville Highway tells about the sewer rehabilitation project that began Monday. (photo:G. Chambers Williams III )
The project includes replacing older lines to help reduce the influx of stormwater runoff that overwhelms the city’s sewage-treatment plant following significant rainfall.
The work is expected to cause some traffic disruptions, mainly on East Norris Road, as the lines are uncovered.
The contractor has tentatively scheduled a shutdown of East Norris Road from Dogwood to Pine roads for either July 22 or 23, from 7 a.m. until 4 p.m., said Tony Wilkerson, superintendent of the Norris Utility Department.
The contract, approved April 14 by the council, will cover about 25% of the sanitary-sewer system, City Manager Adam Ledford said.
“These are the areas most in need of repair or replacement to reduce load levels at the sewer plant,” he said.
Norris has already awarded a contract for repaving a section of East Norris Road from Dogwood to Pine, which will not take place until the sewer work is completed.
The city plans to extend the repaving of East Norris from Pine Road to Cedar Place, near Andersonville Highway, when money is available for that, and all sewer work has been completed.
As for the sewer project, excess runoff of stormwater into the city’s sewer system has caused the city to run afoul of state environmental regulations.
Since early 2022, Norris has been under a “director’s order” from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to clean up its discharge of sewage into Buffalo Creek, just south of the sewer plant, which is on the west side of East Norris Road just north of Andersonville Highway.
The department found the city in violation of water-quality regulations concerning those discharges bypassing the sewage-treatment plant.
Last year, the city also set up a new Stormwater Department under control of the city manager, with the goal of creating a better system of managing stormwater runoff than what the city now has, which includes some stormwater collection lines mostly along city streets.
The problem is that during periods of heavy rain, stormwater infiltrates the city’s sanitary sewer system, causing an unmanageable flow to the city’s sewer plant.
There, the excess stormwater mixes with raw sewage, and because it can quickly overwhelm the treatment facility, this combination of sewage and stormwater ends up bypassing the treatment plant, and gets dumped into nearby Buffalo Creek.
The city in early 2022 hired Cannon & Cannon Consulting Engineers of Knoxville to create a plan to remedy the violations. That plan, submitted to the council in May 2022, called for making the required sewer-system repairs beginning as soon as possible, with an estimated completion date of late 2028.
Under the engineers’ plan, the price for the bulk of the work was estimated to be $5.488 million, with a potential bill as high as $6.6 million.
That does not include the possibility the city might need to install a 750,000-gallon holding tank for stormwater runoff, at an additional cost of $2.1 million.
The city also will be required to update its sewage-treatment plant. Norris is hoping to get help from other nearby utility systems to pay for the new sewer plant.
