After four years of negotiations, Westminster officials have secured state funding to construct an emergency pipeline that will feed water to the city during droughts.
The city sent a revised application to the Maryland Department of the Environment this week outlining the $4.67 million project, Thomas Beyard, city planning and public works director, said Wednesday.
“During a drought in 2002, when we had to truck in water, it became clear to us that we needed to bolster our ability to manage water supply to the city,” Council Member Robert Wack said Monday.
The city?s relatively small, 120 million-gallon reservoir along Lucbaugh Road became so low that year that the city spent $100,000 in two weeks to truck in water from Medford Quarry near Route 31 and Bedford Road to replenish the reservoir?s supply, Beyard said.
The state agreed to a plan for an 8-mile pipeline connecting the reservoir to the quarry, which is owned by Lafarge, a company that extracts limestone from the quarry to make construction concrete.
“In prior years when droughts occurred, we saw there was a need for Westminster to have alternative sources of water,” said Sumeet Joshi, Lafarge aggregates performance manager. “We wanted to show that we can make a difference.”
Beyard, whose last day was Wednesday before his deployment to the Middle East, said that to get to the stone, Lafarge will receive no fiscal compensation for the water.
“They are just being a good neighbor,” Beyard said.
With engineering plans 90 percent complete, construction of the pipeline will start in September and finish in time for any possible droughts next summer, he said.
As for this summer, the National Weather Service maps on Wednesday marked Maryland yellow for “abnormally dry.”
But those outlooks are updated every week and may change today if the region is drenched with rain from Tropical Storm Alberto, said Carmeyia Gillis, a spokeswoman for the Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs.
