Maine Water’s drinking water treatment plant earns Envision Silver Award
The Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure (ISI) has awarded Maine Water Company’s Saco River Drinking Water Resource Center the Envision Silver Award for sustainable infrastructure.
The center treats and filters water from the Saco River in Biddeford, Maine, so that 40,000 people in the communities of Biddeford, Saco, Old Orchard Beach and Pine Point have a reliable supply of high-quality drinking water that meets all state and federal drinking water standards.
The award is named after ISI’s planning and design framework, Envision. Envision provides a consensus-based framework for assessing sustainability, resiliency, and equity in civil infrastructure. The framework provides a system of criteria and performance objectives to aid project designers and decision makers in identifying approaches during planning, design, and construction. Envision verification ensures that projects live up to their claims, and project awards are based on the criteria outlined in the framework.
“The new Saco River Drinking Water Resource Center is a key infrastructure asset for the Biddeford-Saco community,” said Melissa Peneycad, ISI’s managing director. “Maine Water and its project partners deserve to be commended for their conscious design efforts to respond to near- and long-term community needs while rehabilitating environmental functions and the reliance of the facility as the primary drinking water facility for the Biddeford-Saco region. This Envision Silver Award is testament to Maine Water’s leadership and commitment to sustainability.”
“On behalf of Maine Water employees and the company, we are pleased to be the first project in New England to receive a Silver Level Award from ISI,” said Mark Vannoy, Maine Water’s president. “When it became clear that our 1884 drinking water plant needed to be replaced, we were intentional about demonstrating our long-held commitment to the environment and sustainability. The Saco River Drinking Water Resource Center will be a source of high-quality drinking water for decades and generations to come and will be so responsibly. We thank our partners Hazen and Sawyer and MWH Constructors, which shared our passion and commitment to the project and its sustainability.”
The center has the capacity to produce up to 12 million gallons of treated and filtered drinking water per day, which is enough to support the economic development goals of the community and provide a robust flow of water to fire hydrants to support fire protection.
Several features of the Saco River Drinking Water Resource Center (SRDWRC) project were reviewed and verified by ISI, including those detailed below:
Leadership in sustainability
Demonstrated leadership in and a strong commitment to sustainability are required to manage the challenge of changing design norms to contribute to long-term conditions of sustainability. All project partners — Maine Water, Hazen and Sawyer, and MWH — embrace sustainability as a core value. They collaborated with each other, and successfully engaged the community and other stakeholders, to ensure the most sustainable outcomes for the new SRDWRC would be realized over the life of the project.
Use of renewable energy
The energy demands for the SRDWRC will be met by renewable power. In addition, a 1.1 MW photovoltaic array will be built just southwest of the facility’s site boundary to lessen the reliance on purchased energy and instead meet demands through on-site generation.
Protecting surface and groundwater sources
To counterbalance the addition of impervious surfaces within the project boundary for the new facility, the project incorporates several stormwater management and revegetation practices, including the addition of storm berm level spreaders, buffers and an underdrained soil filter. Revegetation of 4,514 square feet of an existing parking lot will also improve infiltration of the property and allow water to filter through the soil before reaching the Saco River.
Wetland restoration
A 2015 site survey of the SRDWRC revealed the site contains wetland areas. Although this project will only impact 1.88 acres of the site, Maine Water is preserving 257 acres of high-ecological-value land as part of the project. It includes a red maple swamp and the entire stream frontage along Swan Pond Brook, which is an important wild brook trout habitat. This substantial preservation area more than offsets the 1.88 acres of wetland impact.
Preparing for long-term adaptability
Flooding is the main climate-related risk to the SRDWRC, and this project is being designed and built with long-term adaptation in mind. For example, all critical equipment within the facility will be above the Design Floodplain Elevation, which is 64 feet, or will be fully submersible. The new facility is also being built outside the FEMA 100-year and 500-year flood elevations. All structural components will be watertight, preventing floodwaters from entering the building via overland flow or infiltration, and the raw water intake pipe will be placed at the lowest possible point to handle fluctuating Saco River water levels.
