Baton Rouge’s South Wastewater Treatment Plant on Gardere Lane is up and running following a nearly $250 million effort to upgrade and expand the facility, city-parish officials announced this morning.
The expansion and revamp of the plant is the largest capital improvement project in the history of East Baton Rouge Parish. It’s a part of the Sanitary Sewer Overflow Program, an ongoing $1.3 billion revamp of the city-parish’s aging sewer system. The expansion brings daily capacity to 200 million gallons of wastewater, up from 120 million gallons previously.
“This is a major milestone for the city-parish in our commitment to the citizens of Baton Rouge, to improve quality of life and environmental responsibility,” says Chief of Wastewater Operations and Maintenance Amy Schulze in a prepared statement.
Officials say operations of the revamped plant, which is about 50 years old, formally began Thursday last week and have been running smoothly ever since.
The facility upgrade and expansion will clear the way for the closure of the Central Wastewater Treatment Plant located off River Road between downtown Baton Rouge and the LSU campus. Flows from the Central plant are expected to be diverted to the South plant this summer, and plans call for the Central facility eventually to be dismantled.
Public Works Director Bryan Harmon notes that while the work at the South facility has been completed to allow the receipt and processing of the sewer flows from the collection system, the collection system work is not yet complete and many of those improvements have yet to be connected to the plant. Harmon says all elements of the improved sewer system won’t be fully functional until the later part of 2018.
