Sludge pump mess spews suit.

Byline: Jack Moran The Register-Guard

Clumps of hair, bits of plastic and fragments of rubber bands are among the debris at the center of a lawsuit filed against a pair of firms that installed sewage pumps that failed to do the job.

The job in question was pumping sewage sludge to irrigate a large poplar tree plantation near the Eugene Airport. The "stringy solids" got the better of the pumping system, the lawsuit claims.

The Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission, which runs the metro area's waste treatment system, is seeking $688,769.73 in damages from defendants Black & Veatch Corp., James W. Fowler Co. and Fowler's insurance carrier, Fidelity and Deposit Co. of Maryland. According to the complaint filed last week in Lane County Circuit Court, the commission's contract with Fowler also entitles the sewage agency to damages of $750 a day from June 18, 2004, excluding holidays and weekends.

The commission hired Black & Veatch, a Kansas-based company, in 2002 to design a system to distribute wastewater and sludge throughout the commission's poplar tree farm east of Highway 99, near the Eugene Airport. Fowler, a contracting firm based in Portland, later constructed an irrigation pump station at the plantation and installed the pumps that ultimately failed, according to the lawsuit.

The two firms are now "playing the blame game," said Dave Jewett, a Springfield attorney representing the commission.

"Fowler said they did what (Black & Veatch) said to do, and Black & Veatch said (the pumps) were designed properly," Jewett said. `All we're saying is, `Look guys, it doesn't work. It was supposed to pump (sludge) and it didn't.' ... We'll let a jury decide who's at fault.'

The sludge is material left over after the wastewater commission's sewage treatment plant in Eugene cleans up the metro area's sewage and discharges the cleaned water into the Willamette River.

The three pumps were expected to take treated sludge from nearby lagoons on Awbrey Lane, mix it with treated wastewater, and spread the blend among 42,000 poplars at the plantation. Proponents say it's a cheaper, cleaner way to dispose of sludge than trucking it to farms for spreading on cropland. Another advantage is that the new system would take pressure off the aging lagoons, which need to be drained and relined, said Troy McAllister, a Springfield city public works engineer.

But the pumps never worked properly because they could not handle the passage of stringy solids - hair, plastics, fibers and the like - found in the sludge, the lawsuit states.

While the lawsuit is pending, McAllister said replacement pumps designed to work as hoped will be installed in the next few weeks. Fowler is involved in the replacement project, he said.

Jewett said the amount being sought by the commission in its lawsuit represents the cost of replacing the pumps and performing corrective work at the plantation, including watering the trees and trucking sludge to nearby farms.

Wayne Gresh, a project manager in Black & Veatch's Portland office, declined to comment on the lawsuit. Gresh previously told The Register-Guard his company was interested in working with the wastewater agency to make the irrigation system work, but did not agree that the pumps needed to be replaced. The company is not involved in the installation of replacement pumps at the tree plantation, McAllister said.

A message left Monday afternoon at Fowler's office was not returned.

The treatment plant in Eugene, which serves about 220,000 residents, receives an average of 37 million gallons of wastewater each day. The wastewater agency is a joint venture of Eugene, Springfield and Lane County.