By Monique Roth
L’Observateur

LAPLACE — Plans for St. John the Baptist Parish’s wastewater lift station telemetry system — which will include intrusion monitoring, automatic controls, water level indicators, alarms, shut down features to minimize overflows and other improvements — gained steam during a recent parish Finance Committee meeting with a bid award.

Parish Director of Purchasing and Procurement Kia Price announced at the Jan. 27 meeting I.C.E. Sales and Service LLC of Des Allemands was the project’s low bidder with a bid amount of $919,400.

Price, who said the project is required by the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality and will be funded through the parish sewage construction fund and the 2010 sewage construction bonds, asked for and received unanimous approval by the Finance Committee to accept the bid.

Parish officials said the primary reasons for installing the telemetry technology in parish lift stations is to alert parish personnel of equipment malfunctions at the lift stations and enable the lift stations to operate more efficiently.

Telemetry is defined as the science and technology of automatic measurement and the transmission of data by wire, radio or other means from remote sources to receiving stations for recording and analysis.

Approximately 50 lift stations located throughout the East Bank and West Bank of the parish will be included in the project, and benefits from the technology will include reduced power costs.

Baileigh Rebowe, parish public information officer, said the system will also assist with relieving customers who suffer from wastewater problems during heavy rain events and the prevention of unsanitary wastewater overflows during failures.

Work on the project will start right away, Rebowe said, and is estimated to be complete by mid-2016.