Can a sewer pumping station be a thing of beauty?

A sewage pumping station is usually not beautiful. There are 48 of them in the city. Many are block-like structures, commonly a work shed with a garage door, surrounded by a chain link fence with an electrical feed. As long as they work, don’t smell, pumping stations don’t stand out.

But what should the Warwick Sewer Authority do when replacing a pumping station in a place where it won’t be missed and could, in fact become a neighborhood’s eyesore? The Warwick Sewer came up with the answer Thursday night when they approved a change order in the design to replace the Oakland Beach pump station on Seaview Drive. In order to meet climate resiliency requirements the new station, to be built on the site of the current station overlooking Brush Neck Cove and Greenwich Bay, must be 16 feet high. 

This will be no ordinary looking pump station.

 It will resemble a mini lighthouse in keeping with the shoreline attachment of the neighborhood.  Tom Simbro, senior project manager with Wright-Pierce of Providence showed the board a picture of a lighthouse with a square house at its base and a tower similar to that at Warwick Neck rising from an end of the building.  The station would look like that.

Simbro estimated the additional cost of designing a “beautiful” pump station at $60,000, which the authority approved.

Authority chair Peter Ginaitt argued for the aesthetic investment, saying the purely utilitarian station would be a blemish on the beach.  The station will be built to withstand flooding from a storm surge. The building will be waterproof up to the roofline and the tower of the lighthouse will hide the pipes to vet the system.

“It’s going to look like it belongs there,” WSA executive director Betty-Anne Rogers said of the station and so it “doesn’t look like a giant concrete slab.”

Rogers estimated the cost of the new station at $6 million of which she is hopeful the authority would receive a $2.4 million federal earmark grant.  She projected the pump station, or should we say lighthouse, will be completed in 2024.

Would it have a light?

Ginaitt thought it might but he wanted to assure neighborhood residents it wouldn’t be blinking and not so bright to be an annoyance.