Yesterday, Mayor Shirley Franklin joined District 6 Councilmember Anne Fauver, Department of Watershed Management officials, community residents and Inman Middle School students to break ground on the $23.5 million Virginia-Highland water main and sewer rehabilitation project. The project will involve installation of approximately 100,000 feet of new eight-inch water mains and 10,000 feet of 12-inch mains, which will replace the present six-inch mains, and rehabilitation of more than 50,000 linear feet of sewer pipe in the area. The projects are being combined in order to minimize disruption to the community. Affected streets will be repaved after the completion of the project in March 2007.
The community’s water and sewer pipes are old and too small to provide sufficient capacity for the area. The new water pipes will provide adequate pressure to accommodate growth in the area and will eliminate discolored water, and the new sewer pipes will eliminate leaks and overflows.
In her remarks, Mayor Franklin noted that, when the community’s water and sewer pipes were installed in 1925, “Dean Rusk, President Kennedy’s Secretary of State, was graduating from Boys High in Atlanta; Flannery O’Connor and Malcom X were born; you could get five first-class stamps for a penny; John Scopes was arrested in Tennessee for teaching evolution; WSB went on the air with 1,000 watts; and Mayor Walter Sims signed a five-year lease on an auto racetrack south of the City that would become Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.”
Mains are to be replaced on both sides of North Highland and Virginia avenues. (Please see attached fact sheet for affected streets.) Residents may be affected by detours, closed streets, blocked intersections and a brief interruption of water service when service is transferred from the old mains to the new system.
“These projects are part of $3.2 billion Clean Water Atlanta program to overhaul our water and wastewater systems” said Commissioner Rob Hunter. “They are important steps in ensuring that Atlanta residents and our downstream neighbors have the cleanest, safest drinking water possible. We understand that our customers in the Virginia-Highland area will be inconvenienced by this work, and we ask for their patience and understanding. We promise that the results will be worth the trouble.”
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