The Kleinfelder Blog

Kleinfelder Celebrates the Completion of the York Street Pump Station and Connecticut River Crossing Project

On Friday, November 17, Kleinfelder staff involved in the York Street Pump Station and Connecticut River Crossing Project – including Program Engineer and Project Manager Jason Lavoie, Engineer of Record for the river crossing design and Technical Lead Gus O’Leary, Chief Resident Engineer John Regan, Program Director Thomas Ritchie, and Massachusetts-Connecticut Area Manager Becky Weig – attended a legislative briefing and ribbon-cutting event to celebrate the project’s completion.

Hosted by the client, Springfield Water and Sewer Commission (SWSC), as well as the Connecticut River Cleanup Committee (formed 30 years ago as a regional collaborative to reduce combined sewer overflows, or CSOs, in the Connecticut River in accordance with the Clean Water Act), the event featured a public open house, a legislative briefing on 30 years of progress on CSOs as well as the work that lies ahead, a walk-through of the project, and a ribbon-cutting.

Local politicians were also in attendance, including Congressman Richard Neal, who spoke of the importance of continued investment into water and wastewater infrastructure, and Domenic Sarno (Mayor of Springfield). Josh Schimmell, Executive Director of the SWSC and a long-standing friend and client of Kleinfelder, also spoke about how the project helps to reduce the amount of combined sewer overflow that’s sent to the Connecticut River.

Now that the York Street Pump Station is on line, CSO volumes into the Connecticut River in a typical year will be reduced by approximately 50% since the start of the Integrated Wastewater Plan improvements began.

As the lead consultant, Kleinfelder designed and oversaw construction on the York Street Pump Station and Connecticut River Crossing Project – which included a new 62 MGD combined sewer pump station and screening facility, retrofit of the existing 30 MGD flood control pump station, and three new 1,100-foot-long wastewater conveyance pipelines that pass underneath an active Amtrak railroad and a US Army Corps of Engineers flood wall before crossing the Connecticut River and passing through a private levee to the Springfield Regional Wastewater Treatment Facility.

From initial design (August 2015) through construction completion, more than 200 Kleinfelder employees worked on this project.

This complex project is designed to address multiple issues:

• Environmental Protection: Increased pumping capacity will prevent an additional 100 million gallons of CSOs from entering the Connecticut River in a typical year.
• Climate Resiliency: Flood control protection is increased through re-purposing the old pump station, and critical components of the new pump station are designed to withstand flooding.
• Infrastructure Renewal: A new modern station replaces an aging 1938 station nearing the end of its useful life and will accommodate future growth in the region.
• System Redundancy: The three new pipes under the Connecticut River will add redundancy and improve service reliability for customers in Springfield, Ludlow, East Longmeadow, and Wilbraham.

The project is a culmination and cornerstone of years of planning – specifically through the SWSC’s Integrated Wastewater Plan (IWP). Authored by our Kleinfelder team and adopted in 2014, the IWP was one of the first such plans in the country to integrate project planning for regulatory compliance (specifically, projects that fulfill an unfunded federal mandate to eliminate combined sewer overflows) and for infrastructure renewal (due to aging infrastructure and other challenges). The result of the IWP are projects such as this that maximize ratepayer dollars by achieving multiple social, economic and environmental benefits at once.

For more information, visit the SWSC’s project website.

For this event, Kleinfelder also helped develop the boards that were set up around the project site and throughout the pump station that describe many of the benefits of the project (view here)