A series of unfortunate events at Richmond’s wastewater treatment facility called for some discussion and quick decision-making by City Council members Monday night.

At the end of July, two sequencing batch reactor (SBR) blowers had failures. There are three blowers that run the SBRs at the plant, and at least two blowers are running at the same time during wastewater treatment.

“We had a catastrophic failure in our SBR blowers. The staff has done a good job getting blowers 2 and 3 going, but we need a blower motor,” said Ron Peterson, Public Works Committee chairman.

While that discussion was going on, the Public Works Department discovered it had a cracked air tank under one of the blower motors.

“This makes things terribly inefficient, so we need to get that fixed as well,” Peterson said.

Motor replacement will cost $18,822.19, but with all the parts necessary to repair the cracked air tank, that price tag grew to approximately $28,000, Peterson said.

The plant equipment repair budget has approximately $14,000 remaining. All excess monies spent will be funded with wastewater cash reserves.

Peterson motioned to approve repairs not to exceed $28,000. Councilman Adam Booth seconded the motion and the council unanimously approved the expenditure.