Utilities Department - Wastewater System

The Town of Lake Lure owns a wastewater treatment plant with a capacity of 995,000 gallons per day (GPD), a lift pump station located below the dam, about 28 miles of collection lines (mostly under the lake) and about 75 manholes with 54 at the lake shoreline. Our plant serves a total of 858 customers, 434 of whom are served by a private collection system owned by the Carolina Water System within the Lake Lure Golf and Beach Resort, Apple Valley and Shumont Estates under contract with the Fairfield Mountains Property Owners Association (POA). Portions of Chimney Rock Village have access to our plant through a county owned 8" collection line. Treatment is similar to a water treatment plant with chemical additives (alum) and chlorination. The actual use is about 700,000 GPD at peak flows, ¾ of which is lake water from infiltration.

 

This is a most unusual system in that it was created at a time when few homes had access to any form of treatment other than a lime pit under an outhouse. The founders and developers of the Town of Lake Lure in the mid 1920's were businessmen who intended to create a real estate development of large estate lots surrounding a beautiful mountain lake. In those days, it was common for household sewerage to be deposited directly into whatever body of water happened to be closest. Few homes in the mountains had indoor plumbing and outhouses were built over cesspits in the ground, which leached into the water table. Dr. Morse and his partners did not want sewerage flowing into their brand new lake and planned a system of pipes that would collect household sewerage at manholes around the perimeter of the lake and transport it under the dam to be deposited into the river below the dam. Therefore, they constructed a network of sewer mains along the bottom of the area that was to be flooded, connected to a series of manholes along the future shoreline to serve the large lots that would be created. These pipes joined together and ran under the new dam where the final pipe opened directly into the Broad River.

 

While running sewerage into the river is abhorrent today, the system was very forward thinking for the time. However, by the 1960's federal and state health authorities saw the need to halt this sort of pollution and required all waste water to be treated before it got to the water table or to open bodies of water and mandated that a new wastewater plant be built below the dam to treat the effluent from our system. The plant was constructed downriver from the dam and was connected to the end of the old sewer main under the dam. Unfortunately, the old pipe was lower than the plant so that a pump station had to be built to “lift” the effluent up to the plant for treatment. The town government eventually purchased the entire system, along with the lake, from the private owner in 1964 and has operated the treatment plant since that time.

 

The lift station, which was built in the sixties, was badly damaged during the 1996 flood by water pouring over the dam. The water level in the lake rose so fast and so high that the overflow gates could not accommodate the volume of water and it flowed over the dam itself. The lift station pumps were in a concrete vault with a metal grate on top located at the base of the dam. When the water poured over the dam, it cascaded into the vault, utterly destroying the pumps and putting the treatment facility out of business. The lift station was eventually rebuilt, but the town, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the health authorities were concerned that this could, and probably would, happen again. At the town’s request, FEMA approved a one-half million dollar grant to construct a new state of the art lift station on the bank of the river, out of the flood plain and away from the dam.

 

The new station contains three electric pumps, far more powerful than the old ones. Rather than pushing the effluent up to the plant, they pull it up from the low point under the dam and then force it down to the plant. Normally, one pump runs as needed and a second pump kicks in during periods of high flow. The third pump is a backup and they cycle so that all three are used in rotation as the primary pump.

 

The project took a lot longer to complete than expected, but it operates very well and came in under budget. And it certainly gives us all a lot more peace of mind!

 

At present, most of the area served by our wastewater system is either along the shoreline or in the Fairfield POA area. It is our goal to provide access to as much of the rest of the community as possible in the future.