The Grantsville City Council has approved a project intended to protect the city’s water supply in the event of a system failure.
Dubbed the West Bench Waterline, the $477,349 project connects water supplies in the South Willow and south water tanks. The city will fund the project with impact fees and is splitting the cost with Tooele County.
The new water line will create redundancy and allows water to be transferred between the tanks if a well goes down, said Mayor Brent Marshall.
That exact scenario played out last year on July 3, when a power outage disabled the warning system on the South Willow tank. Since the incident happened overnight, it took the city a while to find the problem and restore service.
While water can be transferred between the tanks, there are safeguards to prevent one tank from draining the others, Marshall said.
“It’s a million-gallon tank at the south tank,” he said. “We would go halfway down the tank, so you could only move a half million gallons of water out of that tank at any one given time.”
The project also includes the installation of three pumps in a well house. The south tank is downhill from the South Willow tank and the pumps are required to move the water.
The units will each pump 500 gallons per minute through the nearly one mile of 12-inch line installed in the project, Marshall said.
The city council evaluated two bids for the project, selecting Dennis Leard II Construction, Inc. out of Lehi. The other bid called for the installation of a 10-inch line.
Instead of tearing up sections of the Mormon Trail for the water line, the construction company will use directional boring. In directional boring, a surface rig drills space under existing infrastructure for the pipe, which is fed into the opening.