LAKE HAVASU CITY — The city is nearly finished on the fourth year of an 11-year project that will let it give up its dubious title of being the largest U.S. city without sewer service.
Lake Havasu City decided in 2001 to build a central sewer system, which will help in reducing pollution in groundwater and on the lower Colorado River.
"You can't continue to grow as a community if you don't have basic infrastructure in place," said Kevin Murphy, city public-works director. "Sewers are about as basic as it gets."
By 2013, work crews will have ripped apart every residential street, dug trenches through the front yard of nearly every home, buried more than 400 miles of pipe and decommissioned almost every septic tank in a 25-mile radius.
Seepage from more than 25,000 septic tanks in the city's service area is believed to contribute to high levels of nitrates and other contaminants in the regional water system.
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Nitrates are a form of nitrogen that can harm humans and animals in high concentrations and choke a river's ecosystem. High nitrate levels also can nurture fecal bacteria and other contaminants.
The city's location on the lower Colorado, upriver from where Arizona and California withdraw water for millions of their residents, makes wastewater-treatment practices more than just a local issue.
State regulators say they would have stepped in and forced Lake Havasu City to build a sewer system if the city hadn't acted.
The Arizona Department of Environmental Quality issued such orders in the past to Page, Kingman, Bisbee and other communities. The orders usually come with a moratorium on construction.
Lake Havasu City's rapid growth during the 1990s underscored the need for sewer service. But the wake-up call, for many, arrived on a hot June afternoon in 1994.
The city manager closed all the city beaches along the lake's eastern shore after routine water samples found fecal-coliform levels 17 times higher than the allowable amount. The beaches remained closed for weeks as officials tried to pin down the cause of the contamination. An early suspect was seepage from the thousands of septic tanks uphill from the lakeshore.
Tests were inconclusive at the start. Then the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality drilled 14 monitoring wells along the lake. Two wells produced samples with nitrate levels well over the federal limit, as did a drinking-water well in the Desert Hills community. A fourth well exceeded limits soon after.
As a result, the state barred any new septic tanks within a one-mile circle of those wells. With fears of losing tourist business so critical to Arizona's river cities, city leaders began talks about eliminating septic tanks and building a sewer system.
Though there was no evidence that the tanks were polluting the Colorado River, its nitrate levels had risen, raising alarms among downstream users.
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