BREWER — The Brewer Water District will hold a public groundbreaking ceremony at 11 a.m. Wednesday, May 10, at its new ozone disinfection facility site on the South Road in Eddington.

The building will be dedicated to William P. Hayes, chairman of the board of trustees of the Brewer Water District, for his efforts in seeing the project through to fruition.

The project is the culmination of work first started in 1992 when, pursuant to a federal mandate dictated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Brewer district signed a consent agreement with the Maine Drinking Water Program and the United States Environmental Protection Agency to construct a water disinfection facility.

In December 1991, the state and federal agencies had granted the district a provisional waiver from the requirement to build a more expensive filtration plant.

The district also determined that ozone disinfection was more effective than filtration for the district’s water source.

When the Safe Drinking Water Act first was passed, district officials found out through a water treatability study that the city water source at Hatcase Pond was pristine. The officials administering the federal act offered the district a few alternatives to building a total filtration plant, including one using ozone as a disinfectant rather than filtering the water.

A full-fledged filtration plant would have cost $300,000 a year or more to operate, while the ozone plant will cost from $70,000 to $100,000 a year to operate.

Ozone breaks down all inorganic material in raw water and eliminates byproducts caused by chlorine disinfection.

The district uses chlorine as a primary disinfectant, but when the new plant is built, monochloramine, a member of the chlorine family, will be used as a secondary treatment.

The water company sought funding from the Farmers Home Administration to construct the ozone disinfection facility and a new transmission line to replace an antiquated transmission main.

In 1994 the FmHA awarded low-interest loans of approximately $5.6 million and a grant of $2.8 million to construct the project.

Because of needed design changes, the project costs were raised by an additional $1.5 million. On April 14, Congressman John Baldacci announced that the district would receive an additional $1.5 million loan from the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Utilities Service.

The low-interest loans and grant financing for this project will save rate payers considerable expense.

The new transmission line, which has been built, runs from the source of Brewer’s water at Hatcase Pond which is located in Holden, Dedham and Eddington, across Route 46, through farm fields, under Davis and Holbrook ponds then through the woods to Levenseller Road and on to Brewer.

In Decemeber 1994, the district awarded the construction contract for the ozone disinfection facility to H.E. Sargent of Stillwater. Site work began that month and construction is expected to be done by the end of this year.