History

Nestled along the Monongahela River at mile marker 30 lies the small Borough of New Eagle. Established in 1912 it’s name came from the “Old Eagle Mine” and a new mine called “Eagle Mine” and in the early 1900 it was eventually called “New Eagle”.

The small town of New Eagle is a little over a mile square. It has seen many changes over the years having an airport, steel mill, glass house and many more small industries.

In the late 50’s New Eagle was among many Mon Valley communities that were in the process of growing by installing a sanitary sewer system. In 1964 a hand full of local men formed the first municipal authority for the purpose of building the sewer system and two sewage plants.

The first two plants were small package plants dedicated in the summer of 1968. They were two plants with a design flow of 150,000 gpd. With the growth of the community that has taken place and the age of the small plants, they basically wore out and in the mid 1990 it was deemed necessary to replace them. So the Authority with the Engineers designed a plant and approached Pennvest to secure a 6.2 million dollar loan. With the input of the plant operator’s and a huge effort and time a 800,000 gpd sequencing batch reactor (S.B.R.) was built in 1999. It was U.S. Filter’s Jet Tech system that was the main process that was utilized at the plant. Due to the high flows in wet weather and low flows during normal weather this seemed to be the best process. The construction started in September of 1998 with Merit Contracting being the general contractor with D. W. Jones for the electrical contractors. Also S. Morgan Corporation installed the new main line to the plant using 21” P.V.C. and installing 3,280’ of 10” P.V.C. forced main to the plant.

On December 12, 1999 with the old plants that have failed the day before, the valves were opened and the new plant was put on line, the plant was 98% completed. It worked out to be a blessing for the operators to be able to do this. Everything went quite well.

Over the years this plant has come over many hurtles, the first one being a performance test to prove to D.E.P. that it will perform to its expectations.

In 2001 with the demolition of the old Monongahela Hospital a diesel fuel tank was hit and consequently 5,000 gallons of diesel fuel made its way to the treatment plant. With the modern technology that was installed at the plant not a drop of diesel fuel left the plant and being that the intake for Pennsylvania American Water Company is just four miles down the river and the environment was not impacted, it gave us a good feeling that the process and equipment that was chosen made the difference to be so successful at those times.

Also as part of the D.E.P’s requirements to build the plant we had to undertake an aggressive attack on the I/I problem. After spending thousands of dollars on televising and dye testing, a game plan was formulated. We approached Pennvest and secured a 1.2 million dollar grant to perform the work. After months of work and evaluating what was done and a few wet weather events, we came to the conclusion that we were able to reduce wet weather flows by 90%.