Improved water - in both quality and pressure - is on its way to neighborhoods in Southeast Manteca.

At the same time it will provide water for the development of  more homes along the Woodward Avenue corridor as well as the Yosemite Business Park. The latter is designed to have 1,024 homes and a 31.2 acre business park on the northeast quadrant of the 120 Bypass and Highway 99 interchange.

The City Council Tuesday awarded a $2,234,750 contract to Mozingo Construction to install a 24-inch water pipeline from East Yosemite Avenue down Austin Road to a point where it will head west under the freeway. It will then follow Woodward Avenue before turning north on Atherton Drive to a future water tank site.

Plans for a tank that will hold between 2 million and 4 million gallons of water is expected to come before the City Council in March. The tank is proposed for a site along Atherton Drive just north of Woodward Avenue The project also will require building a booster pump station to serve peak water demands of existing customers.

The storage tank is more than likely to be similar to ones that already exist and are squat-style ground tanks that can be found on Lathrop Road east of Union Road and in front of the municipal wastewater treatment plant on West Yosemite Avenue across from the ACE passenger station. Each of those tanks holds more than a million gallons of water.

ANF partner Bill Filios has indicated there’s a good chance the Yosemite Business Park - designed to accommodate office buildings three to five stories - will go first due to the large number of approved housing lots in Manteca. The freeway frontage on top of the busy interchange is expected to draw firms that want high profile locations.

The water line will connect with existing pipe already in place that brings surface treated water into Manteca from a treatment plant 22 miles to the northeast near Woodward Reservoir.

The introduction of treated surface water into the pipelines serving the neighborhoods around Woodward Park will improve the overall quality as well as water pressure.

The surface water is treated with state-of-the-art filters. That compares to well water - while clean and potable - isn’t cleansed to the same degree as is possible with the treatment plant’s micro filters.

A series of submerged panels at the treatment plant contain 25,000 of spaghetti like strands of thin hollow fiber membranes known as ZeeWeed.

As the water passes through, the hollow fiber membrane serves as a physical barrier to contaminants. The porous plastic fibers are hollow in the center. The surface is covered with billions of microscopic pores that filter out all known bacteria and almost every known virus, with minimal or no chemical use.

The fibers are only part of the process at the Nick DeGroot Water Treatment Plant that has built in redundancy, constant sampling, and computer as well as human oversight to assure the cleanest water possible flows to the cities of Manteca, Lathrop, and Tracy.