If you’ve ever wondered how a city knows whether its pipes can handle another subdivision before it breaks ground, Columbia is about to find out the hard way — or, this time, the smart way. The city’s Engineering Department is installing sewage-flow monitors in downtown sewer lines over the next few weeks, according to KBIA.
The Teledyne-brand monitors measure how much sewage is actually moving through a pipe over time — not just what the pipe is rated to carry on paper. Engineering Manager Justin Fessler told KBIA the goal is capacity planning: knowing which pipes are already near their limit before the city approves new residential development that would push more sewage through them.
“If you don’t do your due diligence and just let whoever dump whatever amount of sewage they want down the drain, then it starts clogging the system, backing it up,” Fessler said, describing what happens when growth outruns the pipes underneath it — backups that can end up in someone’s basement.
Downtown gets its monitors first; a second set goes in on University of Missouri campus sewer lines next spring. Once installed, each set runs for six to 12 weeks, feeding data into modeling software that shows how much room is actually left in the system before it’s tapped out.
It’s a narrow-sounding story about pipes, but the question behind it is one this whole stretch of the river corridor is asking in some form. Boonville is rewriting its own comprehensive plan for the first time since 2003, partly to deal with its own aging sewer lines. New subdivisions keep landing across Boone County. The pipes underneath a town are the least visible part of its growth story — until they aren’t. Columbia’s answer, for now, is to measure first and build second.
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