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One of the original companies in Port Arthur’s Business Park is looking to improve by leading officials to hire a firm to complete a water and sanitary sewer study.

MPW Industrial Services, located at the Spur 93 business park, treats water for industrial purposes on site utilizing large trailers with filtering mechanisms. While the city provides potable water, large industry requires the water to go through an ionization process. 

MPW currently has six to eight trailers and is looking to increase work to include 12 trailers. This means a larger amount of water is needed. In turn, more water will go through the sanitary sewer system.

Earlier this week the Port Arthur Economic Development Corporation approved Arceneaux, Wilson & Cole to provide a water and sanitary sewer evaluation at the business spark.

The cost of the study came in at $26,590 and will be paid for by the PAEDC.

MWP’s business has continued to grow since locating in the park and has occasionally discharged large amounts of wastewater into the system at the park. But when the park, designed by a different firm than AWC, was built, there was a small sanitary sewer lift station installed to take care of some of the planned development.

Now there are more businesses at the park with different needs.

“The PAEDC is interested to know if they are prepared for another large user of water, which spurred discussion whether to evaluate the entire system to see what sort of excess capacity to serve,” Ron Arceneaux said, adding they have had discussions with the city and PAEDC.

“The game plan is to reevaluate the new hydraulic capacities of the water and wastewater system to determine whether or not they should consider altering, in some way, the facilities out there.”

Carpenter said the study is important in that it will help with MWP, whose customers are big industry. 

It also affects the long-term plan of the park and services to the customers, and provides for further growth and expansion, she said.

For the water system, the study will evaluate the existing system by obtaining water use records from the city and modeling the existing facility. This includes determining the needs system wide and customer specific, according to information represented by AWC.

The sanitary sewer system portion of the study will look at the collection system by evaluating what exists — including the gravity system and lift station — and evaluate for customer based-improvements and a wastewater treatment plant evaluation.