When it comes to aging infrastructure, small, rural, and local communities can sometimes be overlooked and forgotten about. Helping small local communities like the town of Ivanhoe in Sampson County, North Carolina, can have a large impact on the lives of those who live there, and the future generations that will call it home.

The Planning Process

Our firm worked with Sampson County to establish a plan for clean drinking water resources for the Ivanhoe Area. Ivanhoe is a disadvantaged and underserved rural community in North Carolina. Historically, Ivanhoe has been significantly impacted by severe weather events like Hurricane Florence in 2018 which caused flooding and extended power outages, leaving residents without safe drinking water. This area was without a resilient public water supply system until we were brought in to provide a solution.

We provided master planning and grant application writing for funds made available by the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality's (NCDEQ) Division of Water Infrastructure (DWI). With the backing of the local community from both Ivanhoe and Sampson County residents, the grant application was recommended by the Sampson County Board of Commissioners in April 2022. The funding was approved as part of the NCDEQ DWI Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF) Spring 2022 application. North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper visited Ivanhoe to congratulate them on their award of the $13.3 million grant from the American Rescue Plan Act, which will allow for a new public water supply system to be designed and constructed.

Helping small local communities like the town of Ivanhoe in Sampson County, North Carolina, can have a large impact on the lives of those who live there, and the future generations that will call it home.” David Ross

How the Community Will Improve

Water is a necessity, and this new system will allow approximately 350 households to have a reliable drinking source of water, even if there are severe weather events that knock out power and restrict their ability to obtain water from the privately owned wells.

Residents in the Ivanhoe Area have dealt with shallow dug private wells with high iron concentrations. The high iron concentrations make it difficult to wash clothes and is also off-putting to drink. Through a separate NCDEQ DWI funded project, iron and manganese treatment vessels are being installed to remove the contaminants from the Sampson County water supply and provide an even better quality of water throughout their entire public water supply system.

The original funding application intended to construct multiple booster pump stations, groundwater supply wells, an elevated storage tank, an interconnection to the existing Sampson County water system, and emergency generators for backup power supply in case of outages. The infrastructure improvements will support the addition of approximately 40 miles of water main extensions to serve the Ivanhoe Area residents.

The design team is currently working through an alternative analysis, which includes water modeling, cost analysis, and an environmental impact analysis of four scenarios. The alternate analysis will be used to determine a preferred option, which may differ from the original application, to meet the original project intent of providing water to the disadvantaged and underserved residents of Ivanhoe. Construction is scheduled to begin in 2024 and be completed by the end of 2026.

Giving Back to the Community

Dan Pleasant and Matt West were the original people from our firm to work with Sampson County dating back to the mid-2000s, providing a master planning study to grow maintain their water system.  Since then, our firm has maintained a strong relationship with the community and continues to provide planning, design, and other engineering services to help the community obtain a resilient and sustainable water supply.