NEW ROADS -- After years of neglect, the city of New Roads is addressing problems with the majority of its sewer lift stations.

"Unfortunately, our sewers have been neglected for a long time, and no maintenance was done on them. So now we're looking at the 16 lift stations, we have 13 of them in failure," New Roads Public Works Director Cletus Langlois said.

Just like the name suggests, a sewer lift station is used to move wastewater from a lower elevation to a higher elevation.

When these stations fail, it can cause problems for residents.

"It's a failure and when they fail, we get backups in the sewer and then people start having problems with their sewer. Can't flush their toilets, can't drain their sinks, can't take baths and stuff like that," Langlois said.

WBRZ spoke with several New Roads residents who have noticed sewer problems that have occurred in the past.

"Occasionally, in the past, we had some overflows coming up out of the street, the underground piping over the manhole cover," resident Warren Pourciau said.

Now, with nearly $10 million in funds available for the project, the city is taking on this repair endeavor.

"We were rewarded $6.1 million through the water sector money, and the city obtained $1.5 million in bond money and we have another million dollars in corporate money, so we're gonna be just shy of about $9 million that we're gonna spend on our sewer project," Langlois.

WBRZ was shown several of the stations. The city pointed out two of the stations that have declined the most and will be nearly entirely replaced. One of them was using backup pumps.

"We're renting pumps to back them up now and those pumps cost us roughly about $50,000 to $60,000 a month, so we're spending over $500,000 a year on just rental pumps," Langlois said.

Langlois also discussed their plan of which stations will be completed first and then last.

"We're gonna start with the easy ones first. Some of them it's going to be going in and replacing the pumps and replacing the systems that run the pumps, so those will be a little bit easier," Langlois said.

Langlois hopes to have the whole system done by this time next year.