City of Florence Receives Oregon Resilience Hubs & Network Grant Purchase

This City of Florence received delivery this week of the new Airman SDG 52kW Diesel Generator made possible through the Oregon Resilience Hubs & Network Grant award. The City is excited to add this important piece of equipment into our Public Works fleet to support resiliency and emergency management efforts.

In April 2024, the Florence City Council authorized the City to apply for funding from this Grant related to the City’s resiliency around proving vital services for the City’s wastewater pump stations during a power outage event. The City’s application requested up to three portable, trailered generators. The City was awarded grant funding for one of these generators, with the award amount of $69,585.00.

About the Grant

The Oregon State Legislature allocated $10 million in funding for the Oregon Resilience Hubs and Network Grant through House Bill 3409 Section 86 during the 2023 Regular Session.

"Resilience Hubs and Networks" refers to:

• Resilience hubs - Locations in the community that are a part of the community’s daily life, serving community members each day as well as during emergency response and recovery efforts.

• Resilience networks - The groups of people, facilities, organizations, resource providers or service providers who support the purposes of a resilience hub location.

The Grant was intended to support both these community locations and the people and organizations that come together to make their community stronger.

About the City Application Project – Pump Station Generators

The Florence Wastewater Treatment Plant was built in 1999. It is designed to treat 1.3 million gallons per day (MGD), average dry weather flow and a wet weather average daily flow of 4.3 MGD. Presently, the City experiences an average flow of 0.85 MGD. The wastewater system is comprised of approximately 71 miles of sanitary sewer lines, 39 pump stations, plus 32 STEP (Septic Tank Effluent Pump) stations, and serves over 4,000 customer connections.

The Wastewater Division of Florence Public Works is responsible for collecting and conveying wastewater from customers to the treatment plant in a well-maintained collection system, free of stoppages and spills. As outlined above, the wastewater collection system includes many miles of wastewater pipes and numerous wastewater pumping stations. The pumping stations provide a means of moving wastewater from areas lacking gravity sewer lines to an adjacent area where gravity lines exist. These pumping stations are dependent on power in order to keep the materials moving from the customers to the treatment plant.

During a power outage, those 39 pump stations require emergency power generation to maintain the system pumping materials to the wastewater treatment plant. The three major pump stations located at Driftwood Shores, 52nd Street, Ivy Street, and Siuslaw Village have dedicated emergency generators to power those. The Wastewater Division currently has four portable generators to operate the remaining 35 pump stations. During a power outage event, the Public Works crew rotates these four generators and utilizes the Combination Sewer Cleaner to manually pump out stations without the generators.

Through this Grant, the City proposed the purchase of trailer mounted diesel-powered emergency power generators to add to the fleet of emergency generators. This will allow the City to power additional pump stations during a power outage. In a larger disaster, such as an earthquake or tsunami, the additional portable generator could also be used for other purposes if not needed at a pump stations.

Often conditions that result in power outages are those that involve wind storms, winter storms, or other weather events. These types of events have high demand on the Public Works crew to keep the water and wastewater systems operations – both at the plants and throughout the community, sand roadways, clear downed trees along and across the roads, clear debris, ensure the stormwater system is operational, traffic control, assessments, and other tasks. The additional equipment will build resiliency of our infrastructure network to ensure that we prioritize the seven pump stations with the highest flow during an emergency that results in a power outage. This will allow the City to utilized our limited crews and equipment for other tasks related to the event and power outage.