A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held yesterday to celebrate the completion of a new lift station, force main and wastewater treatment plant that will benefit all 12,500 residents of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, a border community located directly across the Rio Grande from Los Ebanos, Texas, by adequately treating the wastewater collected and thus reducing the contamination of surface and groundwater resources shared by the U.S. and Mexico.
The ceremony, which included a tour of the new infrastructure, was presided over by the Mayor of Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, Nátaly García; the Head of the Department of Public Works for Social Development, Raúl Quiroga; the General Manager of the Rio Bravo Basin Office of the National Water Commission (CONAGUA), Dr. Luis Carlos Alatorre Cejudo; the Head of the State Ministry of Public Works, Pedro Cepeda; and NADBank representatives Laureano Alvarez and Carlos Acevedo.
The treatment plant consists of an anaerobic lagoon, two facultative lagoons and two maturation lagoons with the capacity to treat 26 liters per second or 593,500 gallons a day of wastewater. It also includes a system to capture methane emissions and convey them to a burner for conversion to carbon dioxide, which will help reduce the effects of greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, the project included the closure of the old lagoon system, which was located within the Rio Grande floodplain, to prevent any further environmental risk.
The project is being carried out by the local utility, Comisión Municipal de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (COMAPA), with a total cost of US$8.5 million and is being financed with federal, state and municipal funds, as well as a US$4.5 million grant from the Border Environment Infrastructure Fund (BEIF), which is funded by EPA and administered by the NADBank.
This project was approved to receive funding through NADBank in 2019, and construction began in September 2020. The final BEIF-funded component includes the installation of residential connections that will provide first-time service to more than 2,640 households, as well as decommission the existing on-site wastewater disposal systems. Work is already underway, and first 500 connections are expected to be installed by the end of the year.
