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As much as $40 million in contract work to upgrade Spokane's wastewater treatment plant will be filtering through the economy here later this year, with much of the work to be awarded in the fall.
Between about $30 million and $33 million will be spent to build and install two new digesters to replace a digester that was destroyed in an explosion last May that killed one worker and injured several others.
Digesters process sewer sludge, and are critical to the waste-water treatment process, says Lars Hendron, principal engineer in the city's wastewater capital improvement program.
"It's a nervous time," says Hendron. "The two old digesters are the same design as the one that failed. They take more than two years to build. So we're keeping our fingers crossed that we don't have another failure."
The new digesters will be more efficient than the current sewage tanks, says Jim Correll, Spokane-area...