Riverside Park at the end of East Gobbi Street will be closed for at least a week as crews install sections of purple pipe for the city’s Recycled Water System, city officials announced Thursday.
Originally, city staff thought the park could remain open because, while no parking would be available, pedestrians could still access it. However, during a visit to the work site Thursday morning, Jarod Thiele with the city’s Public Works Department said that the roadway was too narrow to allow safe pedestrian passage.
“There’s a four-foot trench in the roadway, and an excavator and other large equipment being operated right outside the entrance to the park,” said Thiele, adding that he expected the park to be closed “through Friday, Dec. 21.”
The pipe is being installed by Ghilotti Construction, whose crews were recently installing pipe underneath Babcock Lane just south of East Gobbi Street.
“This is probably the largest water project in Ukiah since the dam was built,” said Sean White, the director of water and sewer for the city, describing the overall project earlier this year. The first three phases of the Recycled Water System will have 38,000 feet of pipe running underground from the southern limits of the city to the northern limits.
The southern end of the pipe is just south of the Ukiah Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant, and from there the pipe heads mostly straight north to the softball fields on River Street, though it does take a long right turn into Riverside Park.
Another component of the project is three new water storage ponds near the treatment plant that will add another 66 million gallons of storage capacity to the existing 122 million gallons of capacity.
“And while the current ponds are percolation ponds and are not lined, the new ones will be lined so they can hold the water,” said White, explaining that the most immediate goal of the ambitious project is to greatly reduce, and eventually eliminate, the need to discharge water from the treatment plant into the Russian River, which he said soon will no longer be allowed at all.
Another goal of the project is to then put that water to use irrigating not only hundreds of acres of vineyards, but the large amounts of turf needing large amounts of water at the high school, the golf course, the cemetery and many city parks.
“The bulk of the wastewater shows up during the wintertime, but the bulk of the need for irrigation is in the summertime, so this gives us the ability to take what shows up in the winter and have it available to people when they need it,” he said.
If all goes well, reclaimed water that is not drinkable, but can be used for irrigation, will be flowing through the new pipes by next spring, White said.
