New high school could get service in 8 weeks
GRANGER — Only one 8-inch pipe currently supplies water to the east side of Granger, officials said at a City Council meeting.
“We’re on borrowed time… We’ve got water problems,” said Scott Murrah, president of 5M Associates LLC, which specializes in full-service water engineering.
Murrah spoke to the council Aug. 11 to address water-infrastructure problems plaguing the city.
The lack of an adequate water supply has kept the doors shut to the new Granger high school and athletic complex, which should have opened last week.
Funding is coming from a variety of sources, including the American Rescue Plan Act and federal Community Development Block Grants.
Some of the delays have been attributed to issues with the nearby railroad.
Officials, however, said service to the campus should start within eight weeks. Meanwhile, Murrah gave a timeline dating to 2022 to illustrate what is a stake.
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“We’re on borrowed time.”
— Scott Murrah, 5M Associates LLC Two pipes had managed the eastern portion of the city’s water supply, which includes all Granger schools, but one pipe recently broke due to old age and outdated infrastructure.
Murrah said while the city was in discussions with the Granger Independent School District about getting water to the new campus, a city water line collapsed.
“The line was installed in the 1970s and is what’s called AC pipe, made from a mixture of cement and asbestos fiber. It was very old and very brittle,” Murrah said.
The casing pipe was supposed to be steel, but it was a corrugated metal pipe, “a basic drainage culvert pipe,” Murrah said. When the casing pipe collapsed, all of the pressure on the AC pipe caused it to crumple also.
“Now the entire east side of the city is being fed from this one AC 8-inch pipe on the south side,” Murrah said.
The city is also at “treatment capacity on the wastewater treatment plan. Not only that, we’ve got some old clay lines up by the school that the school was proposing to tie into that we’ve got to replace,” Murrah said.
In November 2023, the city applied for a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, but Granger was several years behind on its financial audits, and USDA would not provide the grant money until the audits were updated.
An explanation for the delay was not provided during the meeting, but Mayor Bruce Waggoner said the audits would be caught up to 2023 by the end of the year, which means the city is still eligible for the USDA application.
Another problem affecting the connection of the water lines to the east side of town is the Union Pacific Railroad, officials said. The city needs to bore under the railroad tracks and cross Texas 95.
“The process with Union Pacific Railroad has many restrictions and is a lengthy process,” Waggoner said.
Strict rules are in place to avoid a collapse, Murrah said.
Through RailPros, a company that represents railroads’ interests in engineering, construction, flagging and safety services, UPRR requested the city use a dry bore, or boring without drilling fluids.
However, the dry bore did not work due to sticky Blackland Prairie mud gumming up the drill, engineers said.
The city had to go back to RailPros to request a wet bore. The railroad agreed, but the second attempt also failed as the bore drilled into an unknown object.
“We ended up having to get a Geotech engineer that had groundpenetrating radar. That was tough and pricy,” Murrah said.
Funds allocated for water connectivity were siphoned away to cover these unexpected expenses, Murrah said.
The Geotech engineers noted several underground anomalies they could not identify, although many are believed to be old piers from the former Granger train depot platform.
This discovery adds another layer of difficulty to the city’s water problems as boring needs to go through, around or under the buried structures, officials said. While Granger Secondary School could see an end to its water woes within two months, the east side is still in trouble, officials said.
Lake Granger is one of the city’s water sources.
