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Renovations planned at city sewage plant
By jeanne starmack
struthers
The Struthers sewage plant, the site of an explosion two months ago, will undergo renovations as soon as possible, said Mayor Terry Stocker.
Two men were severely burned and later died as a result of the explosion in the plant’s gas-compressor room March 1.
The city must replace equipment that was removed earlier this month and taken to Columbus for storage while the Ohio Bureau of Workers Compensation continues an investigation into what caused methane gas to build up in the compressor room, Struthers Mayor Terry Stocker said.
Ken Stiver, the plant’s lead maintenance man, and Gary Wilson, an assistant maintenance man, were burned after a spark from electrical wiring they were working on ignited the gas. Stiver died April 16; Wilson died March 29.
Stocker said the city will have an engineer determine what the plant will need.
“Similar to what we had, or different?” he asked, adding that if the city decides to do something different, it will pay the difference in cost from an insurance settlement.
“What happened was such a catastrophe,” Stocker said. “We want people who work there to feel safe.”
Plant manager Bob Gentile told Stocker in a letter dated May 7 that he is investigating whether to get another type of mixing equipment for the primary digester. The plant’s two digesters, large machines that digest sewage sludge, have been shut down since the explosion.
“This new type of mixing will be mounted on the outside of the digester and will operate on electric and not methane gas,” the letter says.
The plant had been capturing and collecting methane gas produced by the digesters to run two large methane generators that produced some heat for the plant and also heated the digesters.
The digesters are shut down, and that is no longer happening, Stocker said.
He said the plant is back to the old way of disposing of the sludge, which is pressing it and taking it to a landfill.
The idled digesters had to be emptied, and the primary digester was emptied by plant workers instead of an outside contractor, saving the city nearly $200,000, Gentile told Stocker.
The methane generators, a green project paid for with federal stimulus money, had been up and running since October. The city has a year to demonstrate a savings, but an Ohio Environmental Protection Agency representative said it can have more time because of the accident, Gentile said.