Protection of Polish Regions Water Source
The Polish city of Imielin is located in southern Poland beside the Dziećkowice Reservoir, a beautiful man-made lake used by locals and tourists for a broad range of recreational activities, including sailing competitions, fishing, swimming and sunbathing on sandy beaches.
Dziećkowice Reservoir also supplies drinking water to Imielin and communities across the Silesia region. It is therefore vital that Imielin was served by an effective and reliable sewerage system offering the highest level of environmental protection.
The city also sits in a region that has been subject to extensive coal mining over many years, causing damage to the terrain, including subsidence. Between 2006-2019, Imielin implemented a comprehensive vacuum sewage system as part of a multi-phase construction process. A total of 60 km of vacuum lines were built and more than 1,000 vacuum valves installed. Flovac Polska was an integral partner in the project, supplying vacuum valves, vacuum station equipment and a propriety cable monitoring system.
“Operating any sewage system involves challenges, but the task is easier when you are working with a reliable partner like Flovac Polska sp. z.o.o. We know we can always count on the company’s help in terms of design, implementation and operation”.
Marek Jędrysik, President/CEO Miejska Spółka Komunalna
Why Flovac’s solution was chosen
Imielin is characterised by flat and mining-damaged terrain, as well as difficult ground-water conditions. Given these challenges, the city recognised that Flovac’s vacuum sewerage system offered a cost-effective solution, in part because it requires shallow trenches, which cuts construction costs and enables faster deployment.
Environmental protection was also a key factor because vacuum systems operate with negative pressure, ensuring no sewage can leak out (even in the event of a rupture). In addition, this means there are no overflows and rainfall cannot infiltrate
Finally, Flovac’s solution offered reliability and stability (with an inlet system designed to ensure air is always automatically entering the system), as well as easy monitoring and maintenance.
The monitoring of the vacuum system via a cable system (FMS) offers the client stable power and is a great alarm system for activations, pressure and potential failures. Flovac Polska has been a leading developer in this type of monitoring and can save the client money through ease of operations and reduces risks to the community via fast alerts to the operators.
The results
Flovac’s technology has delivered outstanding reliability to the city and unrivalled protection to the Dziećkowice Reservoir. As a result, Imielin City Council remained fully committed to an investment and implementation process that continued over a 15-year period until completion in 2019.
Smaller scale expansions of the vacuum sewerage system will continue as the Imielin are continues to expand.
For a reprint of this article you can download it here
Flovac’s vacuum sewerage system is not only suited to environmentally sensitive regions or challenging terrains. It offers tangible benefits to all manner of new and existing residential developments. For more information, please contact your local office.
The city of Eretrea in Greece, one of the best known Archaeological sites in the world, has had a much needed upgrade. A Flovac vacuum system has been installed to replace old septic tanks that still serviced the houses in the town.
One vacuum pump station will serve over 230 house connections. Over 12 km of PEAD PN 10 vacuum mains are being installed in the ground sized from 110 to 200mm. All the Flovac collection Pits are fitted out and tested prior to delivery to the project office.
Making the switch from a purely septic-based wastewater handling model to a publicly owned and operated vacuum sewer system solved problems for the small community of Miles Crossing, Oregon. It also brought unforeseen inflow and infiltration issues.
The small town with about 150 houses is located approximately 60 km south east of Łódź. Some of the houses are located alongside the river and above the road sloping down towards the river. Between the river and the main road, where most of the houses are located, flooding has become a regular occurrence. It has become a health issue with septic tanks overflowing when the flooding occurs.
Kampong Ayer in Brunei’s capital city of Bandar Seri Begawan is a cluster of around 40 small villages connected by a 38-kilometer (23-mile) boardwalk. It dates back more than 600 years. Today, around 13,000 people live in the water village, about 3{f2ac4d1e1d40dc2e2d9280a1dfa90d854b2d8c80eba743affa37fc4ce2e16def} of the country’s population.
Although some of the houses are now on vacuum sewer networks, many have still not been connected. Historically having raw sewerage drop into the water below only really affected the health of the local population as many of the water people swam or fished in the same water. With the wealth of those living in the villages increasing, more problems have surfaced with detergents entering the waterways, killing off the fish and other local seafood. None of this is good for tourism, especially the odour.
The pipework sloping to a gravity main below the houses close to the surface of the water was cut many times by local residents as it was impeding the way that many residents got around the area in their boats. For hundreds of years the residents drove their small boats under their houses and around the village. All of a sudden plastic pipes were in the way. A simple solution – cut them.
As the pipework was laid directly under the walkways it was not visible and did not impact on the passage of the residents. The number one lesson for residents was to learn not to use their toilet as a rubbish bin. Initially blockages were common and operators grew frustrated by the number of items thrown into the system. The problem residents were easily found as with only 4 houses connected to a sump, the process of elimination was easy and the residents were educated as to proper use. Modern valve monitoring systems will make this even easier.
If you are part of a coastal community it could be worse, your old broken pipes could be letting seawater into the system every time there is a high tide or major storm. Salt water can cause major problems at the Treatment Plant. For communities like Miami Beach who get storm surges flooding their sewers and closing their beach on an increasingly regular basis it can cause major economic and health risks. Santa Pola in the Alicante area of Spain found that the impact of global warming and rising sea levels caused a complete failure of their old sewer system.
The town of Santa Pola with over 10,000 homes replaced their whole gravity sewer system with a Flovac vacuum sewerage system. As vacuum mains are laid in shallow trenches it was possible to skirt around, above and below exiting infrastructure and eventually replace the network. 
When looking at upgrading a gravity sewer, pipe relining can be an option, but in many cases this becomes an ongoing expensive option and be too difficult in a large network. Some utilities just look to replace the old pipework, but in most communities this is just not practical. This could mean uprooted gardens, roads out of use for a number of months, noise, dust and a huge cost.
Flovac vacuum sewers have shown time and again, their versatility. This means either their ability to handle density changes or climate changes. It might even mean changes in ground conditions as happened in Christchurch New Zealand when they suffered from a terrible earthquake. The old gravity sewers in the city and surrounding suburbs broke and left residents with no service for months. Vacuum sewers have now replaced a large portion of the gravity sewers in Christchurch and although difficult has proved to be a better long term solution for the residents and operators.