The bids are in on DEP's citywide pump-fix contract. The agency opened three bids Aug. 19 on contract 1619-KSB(R), a repair deal covering KSB submersible pumps at its wastewater treatment plants, pump stations and associated facilities across the city, and Fleet Pump & Service Group Inc. is the apparent low at $3,350,100.

The top of the tab was a real race. Longo Electrical-Mechanical Inc. came in at $3,430,380 — just 2.4 percent above Fleet Pump. Then the field fell away: Infinity Contracting Services Corp. bid $6,487,376, nearly double the low. Three bidders is a thin turnout, but this is brand-specific work — the contract names KSB pumps, and the shops that rebuild them are a short list. One more number worth chewing on: DEP's own estimate was $2,966,800, and the apparent low landed 12.9 percent above it. When the two tight bids both clear the estimate, the market is telling the agency this work costs more than it figured.

What Fleet Pump signed up for, if the award holds: all labor, parts, materials and equipment to repair KSB submersible pumps ranging from 10 to 350 horsepower, per the solicitation DEP ran as a competitive sealed bid through PASSPort under EPIN 82626B0066. In plain words, these are the pumps that sit down in the wet well and run underwater, moving raw sewage. The small 10-horsepower station units and the 350-horsepower workhorses at the big plants both ride on this one contract, at whatever DEP facility needs them fixed.

This is the machinery under the machinery. DEP runs 95 wastewater pumping stations that push sewage along to 14 wastewater resource recovery facilities, which together treat about 1.3 billion gallons every day — every flush, every floor drain, all five boroughs. Pump stations exist because gravity can't carry wastewater everywhere; where the pipe runs low, a pump lifts the flow back up and keeps it moving toward the plant. When one of those pumps sits broken, the station runs short-handed, and in a hard rain that's the difference between sewage moving to treatment and sewage backing up where people live. A standing repair contract is how the agency keeps spare muscle in the wet wells.

The usual caveat: apparent low is not an award. DEP still has to review the bids — check the numbers, check the paperwork, confirm the low bidder is responsive and responsible — before anyone gets a contract, and a tab that opens over the estimate tends to get a careful look on the way through. Until an award notice shows up, this is a scoreboard, not a signed deal.