Contracts awarded on wastewater treatment upgrade project

Napier City Council has accepted two tenders that will see a start made on manufacturing equipment to be used in the operation of Napier’s $30m biological trickle filter (BFT) plant at Awatoto.

Both contracts have been awarded to Waterclean Technologies, an arm of Kauri Park Nurseries in Kaiwaka, north of Auckland.

One of the contracts is to provide the structured plastic media and to install the material in the two tanks to be constructed on site. Wastewater will flow over the plastic media, establishing an active bacterial mass which will transform human waste into bacterial biomass.

The tanks will be covered to control odour, with removed air treated in a biofilter.

The second contract is provide the rotary distributor mechanism which will spread the effluent over the plastic media. Local engineering firm Napier Engineering & Contracting will assist with the installation of the distributors.

The 8700 cubic metres of plastic media needed for the plant will be manufactured in Germany. When the material arrives in New Zealand, Waterclean Technologies will weld it into modules, fitting the 14 layers of plastic media into the two tanks early next year.

In the meantime, surveyors are regularly monitoring the settlement of preparatory ground works on the construction site behind the existing milliscreen plant at Awatoto.

The milliscreen plant will continue to treat the city’s wastewater in tandem with the new BTF plant. The wastewater treatment upgrade will provide a secondary treatment process, to follow milliscreening and a new grit removal process.

Piles placed on site to consolidate the land where the tanks will be constructed are programmed for removal in late May. A start will then be made on building the main pump station structure.

The project, which is being managed by the Napier City Council, is now back on schedule after an appeal against the resource consent issued by the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council was ruled out of time.

Work is being progressed as a series of contracts. The next phases will be to call for tenders for the design and build of the pump station, the design and build of concrete tanks and the supply of pumps.
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