It has taken several years amid a lot of anxiety while engineers and Plains town officials held their collective breath hoping for the best.

And at long last, construction of a long-planned new Plains sewage facility is well under way with just one more spring runoff season to get through before the potential for an environmental flood-related disaster is averted.

With that, a group of town officials, planners and engineers gathered for a ceremonial first shovel of dirt event to herald the construction of three new sewage lagoons that will be well beyond historic flooding events coming from the nearby Clark Fork River on the northwest edge of Plains.

The result, all involved say, is a much safer location for the lagoons, almost a mile further inland than the existing containment ponds and without the danger of a major flood unleashing a sewage nightmare downriver.

“We’ve been working on this a long time,” said Mayor Dan Rowan as he and officials from Morrison Maierle Design Engineering, along with construction officials and other town representatives posed for the traditional first spade of dirt photo.

In reality, the construction process has been underway for several months, weather permitting, as large earth-moving equipment has carved out the first two of what will be three containment ponds.

Also to be built at the site will be a more advanced system for properly and safely treating Plains sewage before it is eventually returned free of contaminants to the Clark Fork.

“We’ve had some pretty anxious moments keeping an eye on this situation,” said Rowan. “It had the potential to be a serious environmental problem”.

Engineers at the ceremony concurred that the river has been creeping up to 10 feet a year closer to potentially eroding the walls of the current treatment facility. Such erosion would possibly release a torrent of sewage contaminated water into the river, polluting it from Plains to Thompson Falls and possibly beyond.

The new facility, being constructed in a field just west of the Plains airport and away from the river banks, is being designed with updated technology to provide state of the art cleansing of the approximately 100,000 gallons of sewage generated by the Plains area each day.

Funding for the $7 million-plus project, which is expected to be completed by this October, comes from federal and state sources, including government ecology agencies.

“This project is directly related to protection of public health,” said Town of Plains Engineer Shari Johnson. “It is not a matter of if, but when the dikes will fail.”

The new facility, which will be connected by new piping that takes the clean water back to the river after a multi-step decontamination process, will include several new technological enhancements, Johnson said.

“The new WWTP (Waste Water Treatment Plant) is comprised of similar lagoon technology as exists at the existing plant,” she said, “but with upgrades for more energy efficient equipment and treatment process enhancements”.

Johnson said all the necessary work including easements, environmental review, design, approvals and bidding has been completed.

Location of the new facility, Johnson said, has been the key to bringing the concept to the construction stage.

“The WWTP will be relocated to a site outside the 100-year and 500-year floodplains”, Johnson added. “This is the only solution that eliminates the imminent threat of failure to the WWTP and subsequent public health and the ensuing water quality crisis it would cause”.

The new plant will send the treated water back to the river at the same discharge point used by the existing system.

The threat caused by potential failure of the existing site would be extremely detrimental to residents of Sanders County and the Plains area, John added.

“If the lagoon dikes would have failed, over 1,000 residents would not have sewer services”, Johnson added. “The only hospital serving Clark County would be shut down as well as businesses and schools.

“A risk assessment conducted for the FEMA grant associated with the project calculated there would be increased trauma and likely loss of life resulting from the transport of any new medical emergencies to the next closest hospital”.

With those dire warnings in mind, workers are forging ahead with the new facility and new piping to prevent a nightmare scenario from happening.