ABBEVILLE — The City of Abbeville Water System is currently utilizing a $5.9 million fully forgivable loan awarded by the state’s Drinking Water Revolving Loan Fund program to upgrade its existing water treatment plant to provide water customers with better drinking water and a more reliable water treatment system.
The construction project, which began this summer and is expected to continue through the end of next year, includes an upgrade of the existing water treatment plant located at the corner of La. Highway 14 Bypass and Alphonse Street.
Engineer Emily Faulk of Sellers & Associates said the upgrades became necessary to effectively treat levels of manganese in the water. The improved plant will continue to meet minimum treatment requirements and will provide redundancy for the city’s water treatment plant with the construction of a new solids contact clarifier, a new waste sludge pump station and a new sludge thickener with a withdrawal pump station.
The additional treatment units will create system redundancy and eliminate the need for a complete bypass of the treatment process should the system require maintenance or suffer equipment failures or damage due to weather events, Faulk said.
Faulk said the City of Abbeville is also utilizing a $4.045 million grant from Louisiana’s Water Sector Program and a $509,000 grant from the Delta Regional Authority to completely fund the water system construction project with grant funds.
The City of Abbeville Water System provides drinking water for more than 4,800 water customers in the incorporated city limits. The system currently manages three water wells.
“The existing treatment plant has not had a major improvements project since 2010 when the city replaced the existing clarifier equipment, and over time it has become more susceptible to corrosive damage and the need for repairs has become evident,” Faulk said.
Faulk said the system utilizes lime softening treatment to reduce the harshness of the local water, which can be caused by high levels of iron, manganese, calcium and magnesium in the local aquifer.
The forgivable DWRLF loan, which requires no pay back, is part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law ‘Emerging Contaminant’ (BIL-EC) loan program that targets the removal of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and other emerging contaminants listed on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Contaminant Candidate Lists (CCL) 1-5.
“Thus, the EPA broadened eligibility for use of these funds to also include any contaminants listed on the EPA’s Contaminant Candidate Lists (CCL) 1 thru 5, and LDH is mostly receiving applications for using these funds on manganese removal projects, because manganese is one of the contaminants included in the CCL,” said LDH Deputy Chief Engineer Dan MacDonald.
MacDonald noted that the state has been awarded approximately $11 million each year of BIL-EC funds for the five years of the federal mandate for BIL (2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026). Those funds are awarded through LDH’s DWRLF.
“EPA’s broadened view of the funding source has allowed water systems, like the City of Abbeville, to obtain forgivable loans to improve water quality,” LDH Chief Engineer Steven Joubert said. “It’s a unique view that provides the potential for major improvements to water quality for those water systems battling discolored water complaints.”
Congress established the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund programs in 1996 as part of amendments to the Safe Drinking Water Act. In Louisiana, the program is administered by LDH’s Office of Public Health, which oversees DWRLF.
