Special Board of Aldermen 10-14-2021 Page 24
Alderwoman Lu
Did we have more CSOs before and then we reduce them?
Unidentified Male Speaker
Yes.
Alderwoman Lu
Okay.
Unidentified Male Speaker
Significantly.
Alderwoman Lu
Okay. How did we reduce them did we divert the stormwater somewhere else?
Unidentified Male Speaker
So that the city undertook a number of wastewater infrastructure projects as part of their original long-term control plan
that included a wet weather facility at its plant which takes a significant amount of wet weather and treats it. Also a
screening disinfection facility on the Merrimack River for CSOs 5 and 6 which also has up to a million gallons of storage
and anything over that will overflow into the Merrimack but it is disinfected and screened. We did a number of fine tuning
of the system by increasing capacity of pipes to get more flow to the plant. That's pretty significant.
Alderwoman Lu
And | may have asked this before but did any of it go to say like, Salmon Brook?
Unidentified Male Speaker
Salmon Brook - | think that CSO was closed. That’s CSO 2.
Unidentified Male Speaker
Yeah. No, we haven't had any discharge.
Unidentified Male Speaker
No, not the Salmon Brook.
Alderwoman Lu
Okay and just one other question | had is CMOM. Is that an acronym for a couple of different things?
Unidentified Male Speaker
Yes. It's an acronym for capacity management, operation, and maintenance. It includes basically, like | said before,
CMOM program for your collection system will include inventory and TVing all the assets, cleaning them, scoring the
pipes, and then basically determining which ones can be lined and which one can be replaced. You do that as you go
through the entire city. So you're able to, you know, basically make improvements on a year by year basis. You know, it
doesn't happen overnight. If you think about how many miles of sewer you need to TV, inspect, score, and then have a
capital improvement project to now to correct those deficiencies based on the number of miles of pipe that you have. So
it's a long-term process but as you get into it and you go through it, then you become more and similar to the paving
program in a maintenance mode as opposed to a reactive mode. So then you're keeping up with your system. It's
anticipated that, you know, sure pipes age as you go along and they'll need to be fixed, but as you go through the
program once, which is your biggest kind of expenditures because you haven't done anything of that significant
magnitude, once you've gone through all your pipes, it becomes significantly less expensive because you've fixed all
