CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — One is located along Holly. The other one is at Rand Morgan.
It turns out the city is waiting on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality to approve the design of some water restrictor valves.
The towers were built as part of a deal with the state to improve our water pressure. You may recall when the city initially tested them. There was too much water pressure and it busted a number of city water lines.
The new water restriction valves were designed by a professional engineering company.
"The two towers will be turned on when we get enough pipe line replaced in the immediate distribution area and then when we do turn them on, we will turn them on under reduced pressure and as more and more pipe is replaced, we can turn the pressure up and eventually we want to get it to the pressure that the state is recommending," City Manager Peter Zanoni said.
Zanoni added that replacing the old water pipelines is going to cost a lot of money. At the same time, the city will be spending $30 million a year to put in the new water pipes. That process will take 10 years to complete.
"Prior to this year, we were spending less than $10 million a year on line replacement, water line replacement," Zanoni said. "We’re going to bring that up to 30 to even more millions annually for many years in a row. So, the two towers will be turned on when we get enough pipeline replaced in the immediate distribution area."
City Councilman Gil Hernandez agrees with the need to replace our old water lines but he points out that the city is also going to have to spend nearly one billion over the next 15 years to also replace wastewater lines because of an Environmental Protection Agency mandate.
"There’s a balance that we need to do to make sure we’re not overburdening our ratepayers but yet still getting the needed repairs to our water and wastewater system," Hernandez said. 'We’re dealing with the sins of the past. I don’t know what happened over the last several decades of why the decisions were made not to approve this over time.”
So, when will the water start flowing from these storage tanks? The City Manager said that should happen sometime over the next year.
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