BRUNSWICK COUNTY — A year after commissioners expressed frustration over mounting costs and delays in the completion of a reverse osmosis treatment facility, the county has revised the project’s completion date to June 2025 and allotted an additional million dollars to its designer.
READ MORE: Brunswick officials ‘begrudgingly’ boost RO project funding, despite delays
Brunswick commissioners approved the fifth contract amendment for the Northwest Water Treatment Plant’s reverse osmosis system earlier this month. The amendment pushes the anticipated competition date for the $168-million project from November 2024 to June 2025 and allocates an additional $1,094,000 to contractor CDM Smith for project management services. CDM Smith’s payment for the project is now $25.5 million.
In 2018, the county entered a $599,600 contract with project designer CDM Smith to explore the facility’s expansion and optimal water treatment options for PFAS and other emerging compounds. CDM Smith found a pilot low-pressure reverse osmosis system reduced most PFAS to undetectable levels and the county approved a $122-million agreement with Oscar Renda Contracting to construct its expansion in 2020.
The project has faced repeated delays, pushing back previously expected completion dates of September 2022, August 2023, and December 2023.
Commissioners approved CDM Smith’s fourth contract amendment in Oct. 2023; the new agreement delayed the completion date for a year and increased CDM Smith’s contract by $3.4 million. Commissioners broadly lambasted contractors for repeated delays at the meeting last year.
“To say I’m upset is an understatement,” chair Mike Forte said then. “Our citizens are looking at us like, “‘Why is Brunswick County so backed up when everyone else is done?’ We look like fools.”
County spokesperson Meagan Kascak told Port City Daily the county is working on a progress update for the plant it hopes to publish soon; PCD will update this article upon receipt.
The county website states the plant is 78% complete. At last year’s commissioner meeting, public utilities director John Nichols said the plant had reached 70% completion and attributed delays to supply chain disruptions.
The county anticipates the project to expand traditional treatment from 24 million gallons per day to 48 million. The low-pressure reverse osmosis system will remove regulated and unregulated compounds, including PFAS and 1,4-dioxane, from at least 36 million gallons per day.
A June Environmental Working Group study found Brunswick County Public Utilities was the fifth largest water provider in the state with detectable PFAS levels.
“I’m really surprised that Brunswick County’s RO is going to cost four times that of granular activated carbon that Cape Fear Public Utilities has designed and installed in half the time,” Brayton Willis, a retired US Army Corps of Engineers project manager and former public health engineer, told Port City Daily.
CFPUA spent a total of $43 million on construction and design for its granular activated carbon system at Sweeney Water Treatment Plant. The project started in Nov. 2019 and wrapped in 2022; annual operating costs are around $5 million.
CFPUA conducted pilot studies in 2018 with engineering firm Black & Veatch to determine the best long-term PFAS solution between three options — granular activated carbon, reverse osmosis, and ion exchange. The utility decided against reverse osmosis early into its study for several reasons, including cost; the utility found it would cost three times as much as GAC upgrades and increase annual operating costs by 60%.
The Environmental Protection Agency classifies GAC and reverse osmosis as two of the “best available treatment technologies” to filter PFAS.
CDM Smith’s Brunswick studies determined low-pressure reverse osmosis would be most effective for the utility despite high upfront costs and relative novelty of the technology; Brunswick’s facility will be the first surface water treatment plant to use LRPO for post-treatment advanced filtration of PFAS compounds.
