STEUBENVILLE — The city’s $15.4 million West End water project is moving forward, but it’s still months away from being complete.

The work includes installation of a new, 400,000-gallon water tank at the intersection of Lovers Lane and county Road 26, a new pump station and new main lines on Lincoln Avenue.

Water Superintendent Jim Jenkins said Monday the upgrade will “complete a loop to the West End” to prevent a recurrence of the devastating 2018 outage that left residential and business customers in the downtown area with no water service for days. When it’s done, he said in the event of an emergency the city “will be able to feed the downtown from the West End and the West End from downtown” — added resiliency that will ensure an uninterrupted water supply to Trinity Medical Center West and other health care customers, as well as schools and businesses.

Jenkins said the work likely won’t be done until the end of the year, due to the long lead time associated with major electrical components they need for the new pump station and the work needed to put everything together.

“The new lines are in service, the new tank will be in service in roughly June or July and then we’ll do all the asphalt,” Jenkins said. “It’s the electrical components that are holding everything up at the pump station. It takes a long time to put them in.”

Work started nearly a year ago, he said, “but we’re not expecting to see the major electrical components for the pump station until the end of the year.”

“The pump station itself is probably 60 percent done,” he added. “We’re waiting on the electrical components to finish it. The new main line that was installed on Lincoln Avenue is all active and in service.”

He said crews will be “doing some work Tuesday to start a tie-in for the new tank, but the inside of the tank won’t be done until the weather is warmer so they can paint the inside–it has to be warmer to do that.”

“It’s a big project, we knew it was going to take a while,” Jenkins said. “We knew there were a lot of components to it.”

He said while they had everything torn up on Lincoln Avenue they discovered 88 lead service lines to homes and removed them, replacing them with brand new lines.

“All the services were going to be replaced from the main to the curb valve, but we found ones that had lead going into houses and added them to the project to replace in their entirety,” Jenkins said. “We would eventually have had to do that, anyway.”

But with it done and the lead lines gone, “that water is basically new there,” he said. “And at the end of the day, those residents will end up with a new, wider paved road as well.”