Amid growth in the Portland-metro area, Hillsboro-based public utility Clean Water Services is investing nearly $70 million in its 10-year West Durham Basin Improvement Program. A large portion of that is a $30 million effort to improve the existing Tualatin Interceptor that serves Beaverton, Tigard, Tualatin, Sherwood and King City, and connects to the Durham wastewater treatment plant in Tigard.

“It’s the start of rebuilding our largest-diameter interceptor pipeline that was put in during the early ’70s,” said Wade Denny, project manager for Clean Water Services. “It’s being built in concert with all the development that’s occurring in the South Durham basin.”

The project calls for replacing sections of pipe along a route stretching from just west of Oregon Route 99W in King City east to Tigard’s Cook Park and the Durham wastewater facility.

Old reinforced concrete pipe with diameters from 24 inches to 42 inches are being replaced with new pipe up to 66 inches in diameter. That will increase capacity to up to 20 million gallons of wastewater daily.

General contractor Mortenson Construction is carrying out the project along with partners hand-picked under a progressive design-build contract with Clean Water Services. Tom Paul, Mortenson’s General Manager of Environmental, oversees the company’s environmental division. The delivery method is noteworthy, he said.

“Wade (Denny) gave us a list of problems to solve, and said, ‘Let your team go solve them,’” Paul said. “There was no preconceived notion on what the problems were and what to solve. I speak about this all over the country, and what it means is pick a team you want to work with for the next three or four years. It’s not about trenchless technology; it’s about how the team addressed the challenges.”

The project is unique in that three tunneling methods are being used. Two – jack and bore, and horizontal directional drilling – are traditionally used in North America; however, a third – micro-tunneling – is relatively uncommon.

On the ground, a team led by Mortenson and Brownsville, Wisconsin-based Michels Corporation carried out the micro-tunnel crossing of the Tualatin River just west of Oregon Route 99W in King City during the spring. Using an 84-inch diameter Herrenknecht AG micro-tunnel boring machine, crews dug the longest vertical curve tunnel in North America. It’s 470 feet long and roughly 30 feet below the bed of the Tualatin River.

Similar to the jack and bore method, micro-tunneling involves installation of both a large casing pipe as well as internal carrier pipe (three carrier lines in this case). A second crossing of the river was excavated at Cook Park using horizontal directional drilling.

Instead of boring and then filling the tunnel with pipe, however, micro-tunneling crews install sections of pipe behind the boring machine as it works. Once the casing is in place, crews ram the carrier lines through.

“With the cutting face, you take water and you pump what you’ve cut back through the pipe,” Paul said. “When we came out on the big tunnel we came out within an inch horizontally and vertically, and we did it in nine days with a crew from around the world.”

After the casing pipe was installed under the river, crews then placed a relatively new type of carrier pipe – a total of three, with diameters of 14, 16 and 30 inches. This pipe, made of high-density polyethylene (HDPE), is designed to be both seismically resilient and resistant to the buildup of hydrogen sulfide (H2S) and other acidic compounds. Such substances can gradually erode pipes.

“There are a couple of companies that make a centrifugal wrap polymer pipe, so in essence it’s a mortar pipe that has walls about an inch thick, but it’s wrapped in fiberglass,” Paul said.

Currently, approximately 10 people are working in Tualatin’s Jurgens Park – roughly the midpoint between the project’s east and west ends. There, they are simultaneously pulling up old pipe and laying new pipe via horizontal directional drilling.

Officials expect the project to be completed by the end of the year.

“We do a lot of pipeline enhancements,” Denny said. “But this is a lot more unique. It’s our first go-round in replacing these large-diameter pipelines, and what was really new was the design-build methodology; that was a first for us.”

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The stormwater swales on a former landfill site owned by the Dharma Rain Zen Center are teeming with fungi.

Mushrooms sprouting from the planters designed to catch runoff as it flows off the Siskiyou Square site in Portland, near the intersection of Northeast 85th Avenue and Siskiyou Street, are no accident. Members of the Buddhist organization planted them to test the theories of mycoremediation. The technique uses fungi to filter pollutants commonly found in urban stormwater runoff, such as heavy metals and poly-aromatic hydrocarbons from vehicle fuel as well as E. coli and other bacteria.

The way fungi survive and propagate is ideally suited to filtering and breaking down contaminants, said Jordan Weiss, a Portland-based mycoremediation consultant. Mushrooms naturally release acids and enzymes that can break down toxins, he said. Planting fungi on a brownfield site has the added benefit of rejuvenating soil, Weiss added, fostering the return of native plants and wildlife.

“Once the fungus colonizes the soil, it unlocks valuable soil nutrients that kick-starts the soil-building mechanisms,” he said.

For the past two years, Weiss has contributed to the Dharma Rain Zen Center’s campaign to clean up and develop a nearly 14-acre portion of Siskiyou Square. He is leading efforts to plant mushrooms in a stormwater management system installed on the brownfield site, which once served as a rock quarry and construction waste landfill.

Although mycoremediation has been around for a number of years and was pioneered in the Pacific Northwest by Paul Stamets, an Olympia, Wash.-based mycologist, author and founder of mushroom cultivator business Fungi Perfecti, it hasn’t taken off in the Portland-metro area, Weiss said. But interest is starting to grow and he’s hoping to soon test the runoff passing through the planters on the Zen center property to confirm that the mushrooms are indeed filtering the stormwater.

“Mycoremediation, even though it’s been proven in a handful of research and demonstration projects, (is) still not widely accepted,” Weiss said. “It’s not common knowledge. It’s still kind of locked up in the mushroom books.”

In Washington County, Clean Water Services is tackling its own mycoremediation experiment. The water resources management utility for the Tualatin River watershed is partnering with Fungi Perfecti and Pacific University in Forest Grove on a pilot project to use fungi to filter out hydrocarbons from motor fuel found in street sweeper debris collected from throughout the county.

The 90-day pilot was launched last month. If tests later this summer prove that the technique is working, the agency could use mushrooms to decontaminate the mulch-like debris, making it safe for use as erosion control or a soil amenity, said Jared Kinnear, recycled water program manager with Clean Water Services. Currently, Clean Water Services pays to dispose of the leaves and other natural debris collected by street sweepers at a landfill that specializes in toxic materials, he said.

Mycoremediation appealed to the Dharma Rain Zen Center because the organization would like its brownfield cleanup effort to serve as a demonstration project, said Kakumyo Lowe-Charde, a priest and the center’s development director.

“We’re very interested in a pretty holistic scheme of going about this,” he said. “One of our goals is lessons learned are useful to other projects … The mycoremediation seems like a real winner there. We’d like to have some hard data that can help build our case.”

Since purchasing the property in 2012, the center has embarked on a series of environmental remediation efforts and completed the shell of a Zen temple and meditation hall. Plans for the site also call for constructing a preschool and restoring the surrounding natural area into a native oak savanna. Construction of a 31-unit co-housing complex on the site is scheduled to begin this fall, Lowe-Charde said.

The work has attracted the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which recently awarded the center a $200,000 grant to help cover cleanup costs.

Mary Vogel, principal of Portland-based sustainable urban design and planning firm PlanGreen, has long had an interest in mycoremediation and was happy to hear that it’s being incorporated in the Zen center brownfield cleanup. She’s hopeful that the technique will finally start to take off in the Portland-metro area.

“I’ve been waiting 30 years for mycoremediation to take hold in this community,” Vogel said. “It seemed like a no-brainer … We’re one of the leaders in stormwater (and) bioremediation, but we’re not using mushrooms.”

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The cities of Wilsonville and Tigard each received recognition from the State Land Board in the 11th year of its awards program.

Wilsonville’s award was for replacement of 4.4 acres of wetlands disrupted by road construction with 17 acres of new wetlands designed so that wildlife don’t have to cross the roadway. Tigard’s award was for restoration of Derry Dell Creek through the realignment of 1,200 feet of degraded stream channel.

Wilsonville’s Wetlands Project Award was for new wetlands created via a large old peat bog to make up for the loss of 4.4 acres of wetlands because of construction of a new section of Boeckman Road, according to the State Land Board.

The new wetlands are actually three shallow wetlands with three separate planting zones to improve ecological complexity. Removal of invasive reed canary grass was “to provide better habitat for beavers, waterfowl and other birds.”

Kerry Rappold, natural resources program manager for the city of Wilsonville, said the city is cooperating with Metro, which owns nearby land, to eventually restore hundreds of acres of a large wetland complex.

“We only did 17 acres, but it is a significant piece in trying to prevent impacts on wildlife,” Rappold said. “We created wildlife passages under the road that vary in size from 18 inches circular to long, 9-foot-by-4-foot culverts.”

Wilsonville also built a 400-foot bridge over Coffee Lake Creek that spans over part of the wetlands and was offset to accommodate wildlife, he said.

Wilsonville has been working with Portland State University to monitor wildlife passages in the new wetlands areas, Rappold said, and will continue to do so.

“The good news is that (PSU) has seen no statistical difference between wildlife killed away from the road as opposed to under it,” he said. “It’s working and I’m not aware of a single roadkill.”

One day, the entire wetlands area will be returned to its natural state, Rappold said.

“It’s reaching a point that it’s almost self-sufficient,” he said. “I hope in five or 10 years that site will return to its predevelopment state.”

The city of Tigard received a Clean Water Services Award. It recognized the move of a degraded urban creek back to its original banks during sewer replacement and creation of a new bike and pedestrian connection with an elevated boardwalk linking two neighborhoods.

The project included replanting a half-acre of wetlands with native species to retain rain runoff and re-establishing a fish passage through a culvert crossing to the upper reaches of Derry Dell Creek.

Kim McMillan, project manager and assistant city engineer for the city of Tigard, said “the environmental enhancement was huge” for wildlife and people.

“We provided habitat not just for the animals, but really provided that for the neighborhood,” she said. “I see a lot of people using the site.”

The project involved filling in the old stream channel, moving the creek to its former alignment, putting in new box culverts under Walnut Street and adding a trail that includes the boardwalk to connect the Pathfinder Genesis Trail and Woodard Park, she said.

“And we have room for a future neighborhood park,” McMillan said. “We got so much bang for our buck with this one piece of property and think it was a beautiful enhancement to the neighborhood.”

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When plans to build a new Beaverton Elks lodge came across Amber Wierck’s desk, she saw a grand opportunity to treat stormwater runoff.

The environmental review project manager with Clean Water Services recognized that the lodge location – on Southwest 104th Avenue – complemented the water resources management utility’s efforts to bring green stormwater treatment to more portions of the Tualatin River watershed.

“I knew this was something our capital group would be interested in … where we could put a regional water quality treatment site on the property,” Wierck said.

The approximately $2 million project to replace a 1950s-era lodge building led to a cooperative effort with Clean Water Services for stormwater management and stream restoration on the site. Through an easement agreement with the Elks, Clean Water Services will construct bio-swales – adjacent to a parking lot for the new lodge – to treat runoff from the site and surrounding properties.

“A lot of times we kind of just have to wait until these sites are developed or redeveloped,” Wierck said. “The ultimate goal is there are areas that are not getting treated that (are) going to be (treated) on the Beaverton Elks lodge site.”

The agency will also foot the bill for planting native plants and performing grading along a Beaverton Creek tributary that runs through the site’s northwest corner.

“Normally, they would have to plant the buffer,” Wierck said. “Now, because we’re proposing to have a regional water quality facility … we’re going to take care of the planting in the facility and the vegetated corridor.”

Clean Water Services officials are working closely with the Elks and Beaverton-based Stewart Gordon Straus Architect to tweak the project design to incorporate regional stormwater management and provide a protective buffer for the creek. The agency’s offer to design the stormwater management portion saved the Elks about $200,000, Straus estimated.

“This turned out to be a fairly substantial involvement,” he said. “It was encouraging. It gives me the feeling that finding a way to work out strategies early is a beneficial way to get through the project.”

Instead of simply requiring that the project include stormwater management and a buffer for the stream, Wierck and other Clean Water Services staffers created an opportunity that benefits the agency and the Elks, Straus said.

“It’s a big deal,” he said. “It was fortunate that we were in a situation where we could actually work together. I’ve been very surprised all the way through working with Washington County on this project. They seem to be taking a more cooperative approach.”

The design of the new lodge and a deck will take advantage of the site’s natural assets, including views of the creek and a vegetated corridor, Straus said.

“It’s going to be a completely different building than they’re in now,” he said. “There are no windows in their existing building. It’s very introverted, very sterile.”

The existing 21,000-square-foot lodge is in poor condition and would be costly to repair, Straus said. Also, when the building was constructed about 50 years ago, the community organization had more than 3,000 members; currently, it has approximately 600.

To pay for construction of an 8,000-square-foot lodge near the old one, the Elks sold the existing building and a portion of the property it sits on, Straus said.

The new wood-frame lodge will have a much different look than the current concrete tilt-up building, he said.

“It’s going to be a lot more lodge-like,” Straus said. “It’s going to be a very comfortable, homey place compared to what they have now.”

Wierck said the stormwater planters designed by Clean Water Services will enhance the overall goal of the project to embrace the nearby creek.

“I think it’s actually an amenity,” she said. “It looks beautiful because it has a lot of plants in it. It’s going to change from an existing perspective of just being a parking lot and a building. It’s going to look really nice.”

Crews from general contractor Portland-based Joseph Hughes Construction are scheduled to start construction on the new lodge in December and complete the project in September 2015. Work on the regional water quality facility will take place next summer and wrap up by the fall.

Beaverton Elks lodge

Location: 3500 S.W. 104th Ave., Beaverton

Cost: $2 million

Anticipated construction start date: December

Anticipated construction completion date: September 2015

Owner: Beaverton Elks

Architect: Stewart Gordon Straus Architect

General contractor: Joseph Hughes Construction

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A nutrient recovery system planned for a new wastewater treatment plant in Hillsboro is expected to be the largest of its kind in the world.

Clean Water Services will begin construction on its Rock Creek-area plant this summer. When the facility opens in the fall, it will feature a commercial system manufactured by Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc.

Ostara’s systems remove nutrients from wastewater that are then turned into a commercial-grade, slow-release fertilizer.

The system that will be installed at the Rock Creek plant will recover 95 percent of the phosphorous and 20 percent of the ammonia found in liquid wastewater. The recovery process should produce about 1,200 tons of fertilizer every year.

Clean Water Services already has a similar, although smaller, Ostara system installed at a wastewater treatment plant in the Durham area. Once the Rock Creek plant is operating at full capacity, the output from the two facilities will make Clean Water Services the world’s largest producer of the fertilizer, which is sold on the market as Crystal Green.

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If Sisyphus had to work a pump instead of push a boulder uphill, his task might look like the one unfolding around Wapato Lake. There, local agencies work continuously to drain the lake by month’s end, only to see rainfall fill it up again.

“We spent five days pumping around the clock, making no progress,” said Mark Jockers, spokesman for Clean Water Services, the sewage treatment and watershed management agency serving Washington County. “We were just keeping up with the rain.”

Every February, a farmers collective called the Wapato Improvement District starts draining the lake, near the Yamhill County line south of Forest Grove, to prepare the land for crops. This year, however, the district’s main pump broke and the water level rose.

If too much water sits in the lake until summer, the water can get toxic. That happened in 2008, when the dike surrounding the lake breached, causing the lake to flood.

“They couldn’t empty it out until May or June, and the water they were emptying out was nasty,” Jockers said.

The district pumped that water into the nearby Tualatin River, the drinking water source for more than 400,000 people.

“We had to adjust the way we chemically treat water at the plant and install new equipment quickly,” said Willie Tiffany with the Joint Water Commission, the regional water agency. “It was a difficult and costly issue to deal with.”

No one wants to see that repeated, Jockers said. Clean Water Services is leading an effort to drain the lake into the Tualatin River before the weather warms, algae blooms and fish start dying.

Clean Water Services brought two trailer-mounted pumps of its own and wrangled another two from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The city of Portland lent one large trailer-mounted pump and a submersible pump.

Counting the improvement district’s small secondary pump, there are now seven pumps working to drain a lake that normally needs two. Clean Water Services is in a hurry, Jockers said, because of a district agreement with the state Department of Environmental Quality to finish pumping by April 30.

Because of the district’s broken pump, there’s a lot more water and a lot less time than usual. “Normally, they would have started pumping in February,” Jockers said. “But the first pump came on in March, and the most recent one came on last Wednesday.

“There’s 738 acres (of) lake area,” he said. “We have to peel off 1,500 to 2,000 acre-feet of water. And 5 inches of rain in six days didn’t help.”

The effort is far beyond what the improvement district can afford on its own, Jockers said. Agencies including Clean Water Services, the Joint Water Commission, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Special Districts Association of Oregon are splitting the cost.

The total bill still hasn’t been determined. But Tiffany remembers the cost of treating the water in 2008: nearly $300,000. And even after getting a powder-activated carbon-treatment system up and running quickly, the water still tasted and smelled strange.

Contributing money and staff time to avoid that scenario is a far better option, Tiffany said.

Officials at Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services were more than happy to lend a new pump to the effort, said Mark Mitchell, collection system manager. The pump, which the agency bough a year and a half ago, sits by in case a winter flood occurs.

That flood period has passed, Mitchell said. “When (the pump) just sits dormant, we need to start it up and run it and exercise it anyway,” he said. “It’s good to get some run time on them.”

In addition, Clean Water Services has helped Portland, treating sewage flows at wholesale rates as Portland officials replace lines in the city’s system.

“We’re just trying to be a good neighbor,” Mitchell said. “It’s great to be able to share resources.”

Because of the weather, even the combined power of seven pumps might not get the lake drained in time. The DEQ could make an exception, however, said Avis Newell, the department’s Tualatin basin coordinator.

“It’s a little bit of an evolving situation and an unusual situation where there was not much precipitation all winter, and now we’re getting a lot,” Newell said. “If people would want to keep pumping starting May 1, maybe it’s feasible without causing a water quality issue.”

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