City of Newport Looks to Upgrade Nye Beach Sewage Pumping Station

By Brian Bahouth

The Nye Beach sewage pumping station is a small, innocuous building near the heart of a critical commercial, residential and public area along Newport’s primary beachfront. The lifting station is next to a large and busy parking lot, restaurants, residences, shops, and a popular access point to Nye Beach.

Sewage from buildings in the area flow down to a wet well next to the pumping station. Inside the lifting station, a pair of well-maintained pumps, deep in a dry cement well, typically run one at a time to pump collected sewage to the north for further treatment.

The Nye Beach Pump Station is one of nine major sanitary sewer pump stations owned and operated by the City of Newport.

The amount of sewage the station receives varies widely with the season, but according to Robert Moser, public works director for the City of Newport, the sewage treatment plant is designed to handle big summer flow rates, but parts of the system, like the Nye Beach pumping station, need periodic upgrade.

Engrossing problems occur at the pumping station if there is a mechanical failure or if the power goes out. City technicians have 15 minutes to respond to a power failure, or sewage will flow onto the beach.

“It (sewage) flows out, right outside the station, it runs down into a contained area, and then, yes, it does spill out onto the beach,” Moser said by phone. “That’s the only place it can go – as you can imagine, it’s downhill from there. 

“I’ve been here a little over a year, and I think in my tenure so far, it’s happened once that we’ve had it not contained, that we haven’t been able to contain it. 

“The guys do a really good job when we get called out to get there as fast as they can, and usually when we get called out to that station in particular, we show up immediately with the pumper truck to make sure we can start pumping it down and mitigating that before it spills out onto the beach. Because that’s never a good thing for the city or any of our constituents.”

During the September 2 Newport City Council meeting, the council voted unanimously and with no debate to authorize the city manager to execute a professional services agreement with RH2 Engineering in the amount of $229,864 for engineering design and bid-ready documents for the Nye Beach Pump Station Capacity Upgrade Project.

The design effort will focus on maximizing use of existing infrastructure while enhancing reliability, maintainability, and capacity. Key goals include increasing capacity to 2.74 million gallons per day (MGD), improving wet well access and emergency storage, modernizing control systems, and minimizing disruption to the highly utilized Nye Beach parking area during both design and future construction.

“In the design phase, they’re looking at several different options,” Moser said. “I don’t have all the options right now that are before us because we haven’t been presented with all of them quite yet. But we really need to upsize the pumps. That would be one of the key things. And then if there’s a way to upsize that wet well that collects the effluent, that would be the other main key to that station, and keeping it serviceable at the same time.”

The City’s 2018 Sanitary Sewer Master Plan identified the Nye Beach Pump Station as capacity-constrained and recommended upgrades to achieve a pumping capacity of 2.74 MGD. While interim improvements have been made with new pumps and variable frequency drives, a broader expansion project remains necessary to provide reliable service, reduce risk of failure, and accommodate future development.

When asked about a timeline, Moser guesstimated that the design phase should be completed by the end of this year. 

“I would say, build out. You’re probably, by the time we get the design in, and we get what it’s going to cost, and then we try to figure out how we’re going to finance that project, we’re probably looking at a two year process.”