The Vicksburg Board of Mayor and Aldermen has approved a $261,600 agreement with a Texas-based engineering company for improvements at the Vicksburg water treatment plant that Mayor George Flaggs Jr. said should improve the plant’s capacity.

According to the proposal from Houston, Texas-based Trilogy Engineering, the project involves installing two parallel lines adjacent to two existing lines between the clarifier and filter; a backwash pump at the plant’s existing location and a new groundwater well installation on-site on the plant property.

The improvements were included in a July 2021 report on the city’s water system. The board hired Trilogy to perform an assessment of the city’s water system after the February ice storm that shut the system down.

When the report was presented, David Peters, senior project manager for Trilogy, said the plant has the capacity of treating up to 16 million gallons of water per day (MGD) but the pipes carrying water to the plant’s clarifier, which is used to soften the water during the treatment process by mixing lime during the process, developed deposits and are constricted, reducing the plant’s maximum capacity to 10 or 11 MGD.

Flaggs estimated the cost of the project at $2.1 million and said it will be paid with money from the $11 million capital improvements loan the city made in September.

He said the water treatment plant improvements should increase its capacity “to about 21-22 million gallons a day.” He said installing a new water tank on the plant property was not in the report’s recommendations, but was recommended by Public Works Director Garnet Van Norman.

“That ought to take care of the water plant; that ought to take care of it for the next 10, 20 years,” Flaggs said.