Water and Sewer lines in Starkville are ready to be replaced

STARKVILLE, Miss. (WCBI)- It is a problem that cities all over the county are seeing. Water and sewer line failures.

The City of Starkville is trying to stop this problem before it happens.

Starkville utility workers are gearing up for some major improvements in the Pleasant Acres neighborhood.

Terry Kemp, the General Manager of Starkville Utilities, says that they wanted to work with this community because they are seeing an increase in repair calls.

“Typically, what we have done is that we will identify a failure, and we say a failure it might be a line section or a small area. So we’re trying to address those as those occur. This one we’ve stepped back and looked at repetitive type failures and identified from a priority this is an area that is really showing times of age and needs for a lot of infrastructure improvement,” said Kemp.

He wants residents to know that the current system has done its job, but it is time to make some improvements.

“I think, in this one we’ve been fortunate that the infrastructure that we are replacing has served the city well. The community, the little neighborhood, that we’re talking about is one of the older neighborhoods in Starkville but after 50-60 years then we start seeing you know a deterioration of infrastructure, and from our standpoint, we see a huge responsibility to not only provide service but to maintain our facilities,” said Kemp.

The plan is for this project to serve as a template for future work.

“This is the start because this is an approach we plan to use throughout the city. We have several other locations throughout Starkville that we will be attacking the same way. So once this project is finished we will be moving on to different sections in our area with the same approach,” said Kemp.

Kemp says the hope to begin the project at the beginning of October. They expect it to take around four months before the project is completed.