A First of its Kind in Ontario

Located in southern Ontario between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, the city of Niagara Falls is a well-established community of 79,000 and home to the famous landmark from which the city gets its name.
Not surprisingly, tourism is the major industry in the region. Besides tourism, the city also has a diverse economic base that includes manufacturing, professional services, construction, transportation, sport and recreation, and entertainment.
With more than 14 million visitors every year, the downtown tourist district is one of the busiest in Niagara Falls. This area of the city is serviced by an old combined sanitary and storm sewer system. During wet weather events, combined wastewater and stormwater overflows the sewer to the Niagara River. Approximately 30 overflows are monitored from this combined sewer every year.
The Ontario Ministry of the Environment requires the city of Niagara Falls and the Regional Municipality of Niagara to capture 90% of the wet weather flow and remove carbonaceous biochemical oxygen demand and suspended solids in the overflow by 30% and 50% respectively. To meet these criteria, the city of Niagara Falls and the regional municipality of Niagara have embarked on a combined sewer overflow abatement project.
The city and the region retained Associated Engineering to design one of the first satellite combined sewer overflow abatement facilities in Ontario in the city of Niagara Falls.
Associated Engineering developed a preliminary design based on the use of high rate treatment employing vortex treatment technology. Vortex separators offer substantial cost savings compared to more conventional treatment alternatives such as storage, retention-treatment basins, high rate sedimentation and high rate screening/filtration. Value Engineering sessions that were held confirmed the process and preliminary design, and led to several enhancements to the project, which have resulted in additional cost savings.
The new facility will comprise a 260 gallon per second sanitary sewage pump station, a vortex separator to treat combined sewer overflows, a 72-in. diameter sewer to intercept the existing Muddy Run sewer discharging into the new pump station, and most of the forcemain from the facility to the Stanley Avenue Pollution Control Plant in Niagara Falls.
"The project is currently in the detailed design stage," said Geoff Burn, project manager. "We are preparing preselection documents for qualified suppliers and called tenders for the project in the fall 2004."
Construction completion is anticipated by the fall of 2005.