BATH

The Bath City Council on Wednesday approved a contract for an expansion of the landfill gas collection system, as well as installation of an intermediate cover to adhere to state regulations.

The contract approved went to the lowest qualifying bidder, Sargent Corp., and is for $258,230, about $25,000 higher than budgeted. Public Works Director Peter Owen said with its approval, the city is looking at an approximate $30,000 contract reduction through a change order.

Owen said it was in February 2007 when Maine’s governor called the city “because of a report from the state’s toxicologist about the threshold of hydrogen sulfide being unacceptable in the region around the landfill. We went door to door and offered people another place to stay during that time. Since then, we’ve installed a state-ofthe art gas collection system in the landfill that has operated completely successfully from the standpoint that monitors adjacent to the landfill have never experienced any threshold limits.”

He continued, “These pipelines that are installed in the landfill to collect the gas have a limited zone of influence, and as we add more waste, we get above that zone of influence for those existing pipes. So we have to put in another layer of pipelines to be able to collect the gas sufficiently within the landfill so that we don’t start having a situation of uncontrolled releases of gas. Naturally the purpose of this project is, we need to continue to be comfortable with the fact that the gas collection system is going to operate as we expect it to.”

The bid is to continue gas collection as well as to put down intermediate cover. Owen said, “As we operate on the surface of the landfill, when we move from one area to another by regulatory requirements, we have to temporarily close the area that we were operating, so we have to put down what’s called intermediate cover. It’s a liner that prevents water from going down into the waste and creating more leachate.”

Owen said he expects Sargent Corp. to come in within the next two weeks and be done by October.

Councilor Kyle Rogers asked Owen how many more times the city will have to make additions to the gas collection system.

“Good question,” Owen said. “It’s going to depend on some different factors, whether we do the next cell. We’re going to have to do one more layer before we close that (current) cell. If we choose to do the next cell, then we’re looking at three different layers.

“Look at this as sort of like a layered cake,” Owen said. “Every single time you go up, you get to a certain point where we’re going to have to put in another layer of pipelines, so about four more layers.”

Rogers asked if that translates to another $1 million. Owen said that would be the case, and that cost would be on top of building the additional cell. The projects released in the last cost scenario for the landfill included all these items, Owen said.

Councilor Mari Eosco asked if the council could schedule a workshop to talk about the future of the landfill and opined there’s no time better than the present. Following unanimous approval of the contract, the council set a workshop for 6 p.m. Oct. 17.