Water Efficiency January/February 2016

Water Loss | AMI | Climate Change

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WWW.WATEREFFICIENCY.NET

WATER EFFICIENCY THE HE JOURNAL OURNAL AL FO FOR WATER WAT RESOURCE RESOURC OURCE MAN MANAGEMENT AGEMENT

LEAK DETECTION CLIMATE-READY UTILITIES DEALING WITH WIPES

MI? AMR or A s vary

PRISON PRACTICES

Solution ity with util needs

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THE SURFACE WATER CONFERENCE &

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ER QUALITY & EXPO

s i l o p a n a i d In

August 22-25, 2016

Every year StormCon gets bigger and better. The number of participating municipalities continues to grow, which means the number of professionals who are exposed to the value of StormCon grows.

At StormCon one of our main goals is to educate. The value and necessities of stormwater, erosion, and land management education for public works professionals will be better served as we co-locate with WasteCon in Indianapolis for 2016.

Explore a variety of new topics and expand your knowledge of what’s happening in stormwater management, recyclables, and waste management practices.

www.stormcon.com

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January/February 2016 Volume 11, Number 1

features

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26 COVER STORY

Leak Detection

When Clean and Fresh Turns Into One Big Mess

AMR or AMI: Which Makes More Sense?

Discovering data, recovering losses

By Ed Ritchie

The wipe obsession has led to piles of problems and growing costs.

By Carol Brzozowski

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Climate-Ready Water Utilities

Water Sustainability in Prisons

The evolving new normal

By Carol Brzozowski

While prisoners are a community’s “out of sight, out of mind” population, taxpayers are footing the bill for those who are incarcerated.

By Carol Brzozowski

Utilities’ needs vary, and so do solutions.

By William Atkinson

Cover: Phone photo by Neptune. Background ©iStock/Big_Ryan

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Smith & Loveless Inc.

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25th

FORESTER ANNIVERSARY

Group Editor John Trotti; jtrotti@forester.net

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Production Editor Kelsey Gripenstraw Managing Production Editor Brianna Duncan IT/Online Support Steven Grimaud Web Editor David Rachford Webmaster Nadia English; nenglish@forester.net Assistant Editor Arturo Santiago Director of Online Media & IT John Richardson

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departments 8 48 50 52 54 56 57 58

Senior Brand Managers Mark Gersten, Geoff Solo, Eileen Duarte

Editor’s Comments Project Profile Guest Commentary, John Sala Guest Commentary, Aaron Zahn ShowCase Spotlight Marketplace/Advertiser’s Index Reader Profile

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Editor’s Comments John Trotti

Is It Time to Change the Experiment?

AS GROUP EDITOR, every once in a while I get to poach on our suite of publications and shift the prospective from today’s concerns to those of a broader horizon —so here goes.

One of the most memorable days was my first as a college freshman where in back-to-back lectures I was treated to what seemed then to be the wisdom of the universe.

At 9:00 a.m., the head of the Geology Department—also head of USGS, located six miles up the road—introduced the eager band of Geology 101 students with descriptions of building processes, ending his preface with a backhanded slap at “ . . . those who think the continents are moving around.”

The 10:00 a.m. introduction to Economics 101, again performed by its department head, was no less insightful. In explaining the difference between economic and free resources, the professor pointed out that “…air, water, and dirt are free resources,” and therefore not subject to the laws of supply and demand.

The year was 1954, three years before the sea floor findings of the 1957 Geophysical Year launched the Unified Theory of Plate Tectonics that knocked conventional geology on its ear. Likewise, our vision and understanding of natural resource use, abuse, and sustainability in the interceding 50 years have received a severe wake-up call. Response to plate tectonics has been the purposeful migration of our population to seismically supercharged portions of the nation, while our response to resource management has been . . . what? Certainly something less than enlightened.

SOCIETAL TECTONICS Over the last half-century, we have undergone a transition from a rural to an urban society, a trend that is acceler-

ating—taxing our ability to provide new water delivery and discharge systems, and overwhelming those already in existence. I’ve listened to estimates for the repair, replacement, and upgrade of our existing water infrastructure between now and mid-century range from $15 trillion to $30 trillion . . . figures, mind you, predicated on fighting a rear-guard action. Road repairs, right-of-way demands, and new highway construction could add another 50% to the total.

It’s one thing to screw up your courage enough to ask where such amounts of money might come from, but quite another to question our society’s ability to actually mobilize itself to utilize such an investment. In short, even if we could find the funds, could we actually deploy them in a meaningful way? I think not, and even if we could, is that the proper response?

It still seems like only yesterday our nation reeled in the wake of wellplanned, organized, and coordinated terrorist attacks designed to inflict the maximum number of human casualties and capture the undivided attention of the entire world. Now after four-anda-half years of digesting the lessons of those attacks, and devoting an enormous amount of our national treasure to ensure our ability to respond to disasters of all sorts under the banner of “Homeland Security,” we watched in impotent amazement the colossal disconnect between the planners and those responsible for putting the plans into action, in the wake of the biblical-class storms of the past couple of years. Bad enough was the loss of life, property, and public funds, but infinitely worse than that was the precious time squandered in the development of programs so bloated and far removed from the threats they were supposed to meet that they became impediments to those on the firing line.

LEAN THINKING In addition to Water Efficiency, we publish five other infrastructure-related publications—MSW Management, Erosion Control, Grading & Excavation Contractor, Stormwater, and Business Energy—for professional audiences, a situation that makes us acutely aware of the common denominators and barriers that exist among their subjects.

You may find it a stretch to believe that such disparate areas as water handling, transportation infrastructure, waste handling, and energy resource management have much in common, but I’d like to suggest that the factors affecting them at the deepest level are strikingly similar. More to the point, lean thinking lies at the heart of each, and in that sense the magazine’s title might as easily be Lean Water.

The areas of command and control, once in the hands of predominantly local interests, have gravitated inexora-

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EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD RYAN J. ALSOP Director of Government & Public Affairs Long Beach Water Department Long Beach, CA

SCOTT N. DUFF, MCIP RPP Manager, Program Coordination Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs Ontario, Canada

CHRIS EARLEY Principal Greening Urban, LLC Richmond, VA

LUIS S. GENEROSO Water Resources Manager City of San Diego Water Department San Diego, CA

NEIL S. GRIGG Professor of Civil Engineering Colorado State University Fort Collins, CO

ALEX H. JOHNSON Senior Freshwater Solutions Director The Freshwater Trust Portland, OR

GARY KLEIN Affiliated International Management LLC. Newport Beach, CA

GEORGE KUNKEL JR., P.E.

ISTOCK/MIHAI ANDRITOIU

Principal Kunkel Water Efficiency Consulting Philadelphia, PA

Sunrise over Croton Dam, NY

bly to higher and more remote levels of centralization, a situation not well suited to the demands and changes taking place in our society. Bad enough by itself, the curse of institutionalization carries with it an even greater danger—a disconnect between us as individuals in recognizing the seriousness of the challenges we face and the acceptance of responsibility for taking timely and effective action.

IS THE SKY FALLING? Not if we don’t wimp out. While it’s clear that we no longer have the luxury of sitting back and watching the process go from critical to life-threatening, it is equally important that we don’t rush our way into wasteful, feel-good—perhaps even counter-productive—solutions.

Instead, we need now to step back and take a long-range look at the challenges and threats we’re facing, where they came from, just what it is we must achieve to survive, and even what life-

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style changes we’re willing to accept 10, 20, 50 years down the line. What we’re engaged in is a process—one in which we may not like some of the casualties such a regimen will produce—but only in this way will we be able to see clearly the actions necessary to the survival of ourselves and the societal values we hold in common.

Finally, I can’t help but come back to the mighty Pogo recognition that “We have met the enemy and he are us.”

Without public awareness and dedicated support, no program, and no amount of wisdom or intelligence can be the architect of victory. Success lies in turning on light bulbs of knowledge one person at a time . . . starting with us.

What will it take to achieve this?

Darned if I know, but I’ll go back to the question I asked in the title and say, yes, it is time to change the experiment, and that’s what every page of Water Efficiency is dedicated to promoting. WE

TYRONE LAFAY Water Conservation Coordinator Santa Barbara County Water Agency Santa Barbara, CA

MARY KAY MALCOLM Business Development Manager American Water Resources Fort Collins, CO

MELISSA MEEKER Executive Director WateReuse Association Alexandria, VA

JEFFREY J. MOSHER Executive Director National Water Research Institute Fountain Valley, CA

DANIEL RANSOM Water Conservation Program Manager Tucson Water Tucson, AZ

PETER P. ROGERS Professor of City Planning Gordon McKay Professor of Environmental Engineering, Harvard University Cambridge, MA

DAN STRUB Conservation Program Coordinator Water Loss Specialist City of Austin, TX

BRIAN VINCHESI President Irrigation Consulting Inc. Pepperell, MA

TRACY YOUNG Growth Technologies Research and Development Director Dow Water & Process Solutions Midland, MI

DAVID ZOLDOSKE, EDD Director Center for Irrigation Technology California State University–Fresno Fresno, CA

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Leak Detection Discovering data, recovering losses

By Ed Ritchie

The McCrometer FPI Mag Flow Meter is an example of a leak detection tool, used by industrial and municipal water treatment systems.

A

s water utilities face higher production costs, detecting and repairing leaks has grown in importance. Whether the cause is scarce resources from a drought, higher prices for electricity, or the costs of treating water that never reaches the customer, utilities can’t afford the losses of revenue from leaks. But leaks can be large or small, and their locations may be spread out over hundreds of miles. With aging infrastructure and complex distribution systems confounding matters, how can a utility identify and prioritize their most urgent leaks?

Actually, it’s not that difficult. From regional AMI systems to simple flow meters, there are a variety of options, and we’ve got the experts ready to explain how to get results. Fast. Now, let’s see what’s available.

POINT OF USE A drought can hit a utility’s budget hard, so Neptune Technology Group Inc., Tallassee, AL, recommends a two-pronged approach that leverages point-of-use leak detection and data logging capabilities. According to John Parks, Neptune’s director of new business development, point of use leak detection is a function of the Neptune E-Coder and R900 or R450 meter interface units (MIUs) and it’s integrated with the E-Coder register or connected via a cable. To accommodate legacy equipment, the E-Coder’s radio-integrated version—or the version with a separate radio—can be easily retrofitted to an existing Neptune meter in the field.

“For detecting leaks on the residential side, Neptune offers a solid-state encoder,” says Parks. “The technology divides a

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MCCROMETER

24-hour period into 96 15-minute intervals, detecting flow in those 15-minute periods. The E-Coder uses this interval data to determine if there’s a continuous or intermittent leak at a residence, and it is extremely accurate. If there’s flow in all 96 15-minute intervals, there is obviously a continuous leak on the residential side of the meter. Intermittent leak examples are faulty flapper valves in the toilet, or a sink shut-off valve that doesn’t tighten up enough and continues to drip.”

With the leak identified, a utility can use customer information system software to automatically notify customers, without any interaction by the utility staff. Neptune’s N_SIGHT host software can send e-mails or texts to alert customers, and they can also be notified of leak conditions via their billing statements. Results are fast. If the utility has a fixed network, leak condition flags can appear within 24 hours.

With mobile read systems, utilities won’t see leak condition flags until they read the meters and download the data to N_SIGHT. “The N_SIGHT host software suite can be onsite or hosted via a software-as-a-service model, and it’s user-friendly,” adds Parks. “It can be navigated efficiently following a short implementation/training session. The software provides residential leak detection in graphical and tabular formats. The host software retains two years of data so leak detection information and history can be analyzed and compared over time. For distribution line leak detection, our N_SIGHT host software, using our fixed network system architecture, has the ability to provide district metered area analysis. The system takes a snapshot in time of the system and districts and compares water pumped versus water billed, to identify distribution line leakage and assist in targeting locations. Distribution line leak detection can also be determined by the deployment of acoustic leak sensors with Neptune radio MIUs. The data can be collected

by Neptune meter reading technologies and displayed in reports in N_SIGHT.” To add further automation to the system, a utility can combine Neptune E-Coder data, N_SIGHT software, ESRI geospatial mapping, and Cityworks, so water leaks can be detected. Then, the locations are identified and mapped out, and work orders are generated.

PRESSURE When looking at the features of an AMI system, utilities should consider the benefits of pressure management analytics, says Joe Ball, director of water solutions marketing for Itron, Liberty Lake, WA. “A pressure management system can be helpful because some utilities have an issue with pressure zones,” explains Ball. “It’s tough to maintain a perfect pressure when there could be issues such as elevation and demand on the network. So the pressure has to be monitored throughout the day. But some utilities end up running the pressure at a higher rate, and it’s very hard on the network infrastructure, especially if there are leaks and cracks. The pressure fluctuates throughout the day and it puts a lot of strain on the network.

And it increases the potential for larger leaks.”

Itron’s system allows for pressure monitors and sensors at multiple sites in a pressure zone, and features a control mechanism that analyzes existing pressure and adjusts the controls to optimize the pressure throughout the day. Ball adds, “In the past, you had to send a workman out to take a pressure reading. But today you can utilize sensors to tell you the pressures from the AMI network, and you get much more frequent data in a granular format. So instead of just saying we need a certain pressure for that critical zone, the analytics can tell you that you don’t have to keep it that high. It monitors pressure fluctuations and helps save the infrastructure.”

With Itron’s analytic solution, a utility can group all of the customers in a district into a pressure zone and compare

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ITRON

the consumption at their meters, with the amount of water running through the district meter. Acoustic leak sensor data can be added, so if there’s a district that has a variance, the additional data can pinpoint potential distribution leaks in that particular district. The results of the comparison is to identify leaks and the volume of lost water, so the utility can prioritize their maintenance strategy.

Depending on the size of the utility’s service area, setting up an AMI system with all the features of leak detection and pressure zone reading could appear fairly daunting, but it can be done in manageable steps. “You can do it during the AMI install with just a port on the communication module because it will identify the leak sensors and start recording the acoustics every 22 1/2 minutes, and it sends that data to the software,” says Ball. “It’s very powerful, especially for utilities such as those in California where all the restrictions and mandatory reductions have been put in place and both distribution and meter leaks are a way to grab some low hanging fruit.”

Itron’s leak detection analytics can compare usage of all of the customers within a given district.

STANDALONE SYSTEMS For those utilities that want leak detection, but are struggling with limited funds, there are standalone leak detection systems. For example, Rockdale County, GA, deployed a leak detection system from Fluid Conservation Systems, Milford, OH, and discovered 50 leaks in their first year of using the system. Rockdale County Water Resource maintains over 600 miles of water mains and 3,100 valves, to serve 27,000 connections. The county’s unbilled water rate was 34%, before it purchased a system consisting of 370 Permalog+ acoustic leak noise loggers, a Patroller II drive-by data collection device, a TriCorr real time leak noise correlator, a SoundSens “i” advanced correlating logger system and an X-Mic ground microphone. The system analyzes sound from water lines for leak noise, and transmits the data to mobile collection units to pinpoint underground leaks to minimize repair time and cost. Rockdale Water and Sewer Systems staff also completed extensive product training to ensure proper operation.

Rockdale officials estimated that the 50 leaks were responsible for the loss of over 248,000 gallons of water per day. At a cost of $1 per 1,000 gallons of water, the new leak detection program already saved Rockdale County over $90,000 per year. In February of 2015, Fluid Conservation Systems added secondary validation to its PermaNet leak detection system. The new PermaNet+ gives operators three secondary options to check for false positives prior to team deployment.

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NEPTUNE

FLOW METERING Many utilities are turning to flow meters as another effective tool in discovering leaks. For example, McCrometer, Hemet, CA, offers its FPI Mag Flow Meter, as a solution for both industrial and municipal water treatment systems. It boasts an accuracy of ±0.5%, and equally important, it installs without cutting pipe, welding flanges, de-watering lines, or interrupting service. Flow meters are finding wide acceptance in a variety of industries, such as agricultural irrigation, municipal/industrial water and wastewater, oil and gas, and institutional facilities. But the company has seen much growth in the area of metering city water mains, according to Dan Hardin, regional sales manager of the municipal water market for McCrometer.

“Customers are installing the flowmeters throughout their cities on water mains,” says Hardin. “Let’s say they’re pumping 1,000,000 gallons of water into the system and they have several districts and homes and businesses with water meters that are collecting the usage. For leak detection, they will install our meter for each district, and compare their meter reads from the homes and businesses to see if they have a certain percentage of water loss. Usually the older sections of town have water losses sometimes as high as 40 to 50%. Leak detection is very important because it’s lost water that the utility can’t bill for, yet they’re still paying to make the water, clean it, pump it, and deliver it.”

Compared to the typical full scale water mains meter, McCrometer products can save time and labor on installations.

“Next to a large commercial mag meter weighing 500 pounds, installation is an entirely different process,” says Hardin. “It doesn’t require a crane and three or four guys, and you don’t have to shut the line off. Basically you put a saddle around the line and drill a 2-inch hole, then put in the insertion meter.

The other unique aspect of the product is that if anything goes wrong with it you can simply pull it out and shut the valve.

Whereas with a with a larger meter, it’s a huge complicated project.”

CUSTOMER SIDE LEAKS What about the leaks that happen on the customer’s side?

When water was cheap, and sustainability didn’t have its own page in a corporation’s annual report, companies and institutions didn’t put a high priority on water losses. But that has changed, says David Taylor, chief of operations at WaterSignal, Alpharetta, GA. “We’re seeing quite a bit of pick up on the commercial and school side,” says Taylor. “We look at school systems and that’s where there’s a lot of future growth. On the commercial side, we have a cooling tower graph that allows customers to compare their makeup usage to their blowdown usage. On a cooling tower the cycles of concentration Neptune combines have to be at very specific levels to geospatial mapping maximize the efficiency, and also with its E-Coder data to determine how much water and and N_SIGHT software chemicals you’re putting in. The for easy leak detection. data we’re collecting allows you to diagnose the cooling tower and determine its operations and efficiencies, so you can maximize your water and chemical consumption.”

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Taylor also sees customers benefitting by applying for sewer adjustments at the end of the year, based on the water that didn’t enter the sewer. For example, during a cooling tower blowdown there is evaporation and loss, and because that water doesn’t go down the drain, a company can apply for a sewer credit to their water utility.

Multi-family apartment owners can also benefit. Although a utility can meter and monitor the overall water usage of a building, owners have to be concerned with water usage and leaks within individual units. “We see a lot of copper pipes bursting on the multifamily side in winter, and we have our technicians on standby to monitor and alert customers.

Owners can analyze the character of leaks and break the data down to look at it hour A street view map showing the leak alert icons without layer control from Neptune by hour, and see if an apartment unit is using water during early morning hours when it shouldn’t be,” sometimes 24/7, and the industries that we work with have says Taylor. “Also, they can benchmark usage to apartments of identified the usage of specific departments to see if they can similar size and see if the ranges are within the range what it cut back. The data highlights where they can trim the fat on should be at a certain time of day.” the water usage.”

Leak detection and conservation is a growing concern for For simplicity, WaterSignal’s products are designed for the pharmaceutical companies and laboratories, adds Taylor. access through the company’s cloud network. The products “If you look at laboratories, they use water for their processes are also easy to install. “We designed the system to be a simple

AMI Data Helps Audits Meet Government Standards In the information age, audits are becoming the norm, and collecting data from AMI is one of the surest ways to meet standards that include leak and lost water data.

For example, the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) revised the provisions of its Water Code regarding efficiency for water suppliers. The revisions require submittal of an annual AWWA/IWA water audit from the 600 water utilities in its jurisdiction. The DRBC oversees water resources for the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi River in the United States.

Members include the states of New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New York, as well as the United States Army Corps of Engineers.

The DRBC requires its members to use AWWA’s Free Water Audit Software as the data collection tool. Along with the annual water audit, utilities distributing more than 100,000 gallons per day must have a systematic program to monitor and control leakage.

Components of the program include periodic surveys, recommendations to monitor and control leakage, and scheduling for implementing the recommendations.

Programs are subject to review by the utility’s state agency and must be updated a minimum of every three years.

The requirements may seem rigid, but considering the neglected condition of so much of

America’s infrastructure, they are long overdue, and in the case of one DRBC member, New York, the amount of water that could have been saved (15–35 million gallons per day) is staggering. The losses continue to occur in sections of the Delaware Aqueduct, a water tunnel that delivers over 50% of the total drinking water to New York City daily. Some of the leaks can be repaired in the tunnel, but others require constructing a bypass tunnel around the leaking segment. At a cost of $1.5 billion, the price tag for the repairs is almost as staggering as the losses. But wait—that doesn’t include the losses from the millions of gallons that leaked out of the system.

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installation with the idea that a lot of our customers want to do a self-install,” says Taylor.

“Our new Generation Six device will have lithium ion batteries. It uploads the data once a day between 3 and 4 a.m., and if there’s excess usage or consumption above the thresholds set for hourly and daily consumption, the system will upload the data for seven hours worth of data so the customer can see what transpired up until the point of the leak in a system. They can see the severity of the leak and if repairs have been effective, and the alerts continue hourly until the issue is rectified.”

As an example of effective data analysis, Taylor notes the efforts of a national chain of car washes, where the customer captured the amount of water they used at each car wash each day, and the total number of cars washed.

The data revealed the number of gallons per car per day, and the company maximized their efficiency.

Landscape irrigation is another industry where data analysis can make a difference. Taylor says it’s not unusual to find that irrigation systems are using up to 50% more water than needed. “We show the property owners the hour by hour usage and they can compare it to the surface area and how much water they should be putting on the ground. Typically, there’s an immediate reduction in water usage. Irrigation systems are kind of out of sight, and out of mind on automated systems, and many times you have broken pipes and sprinklers, or issues that are not seen, so this software can help determine if there is damage or overwatering.”

WaterSignal can track weather data for properties based on the ZIP code, and show the property owner’s precipitation data. An analysis of water usage can reveal problems with rain sensors and irrigation controllers.

redundancy, and during a natural disaster, these systems have helped utilities continue their operations and boosted recovery times considerably. For example, in October 2012, when Hurricane Sandy steamrolled across the East Coast, much of New York City was under water and flooding disabled many points of the city’s infrastructure. Yet, The New York City Department of Environmental Protection’s Star Network, an AMI system installed by Aclara, Hazelwood, MO, remained in service, despite the loss of power to a number of data collector units (DCUs). Aclara credits the system’s high level of redundancy, which allowed the undamaged DCUs to back up the damaged units, and continue collecting data from the thousands of meter transmission units installed throughout the city.

Leak detection and customer status also benefitted.

With the system still functioning, utility engineers analyzed the data to find leaks, and areas of zero water usage, because those could indicate areas that were evacuated. The utility also looked at the data and found residences that had an abnormally high rate of water consumption after the storm, indicating possible damage to a specific property. Both the utility and its customers benefitted, but ultimately, it doesn’t take a natural disaster to see the benefits from leak detection. Stopping the costly waste of water and its impact on the environment are equally important to utilities. Isn’t it time to take a closer look at these technologies? WE Ed Ritchie writes frequently on energy and water resource issues.

FIXED NETWORKS Now that we’ve looked at a variety of solutions technologies for both the utility and private sectors, let’s circle back to AMI systems and make note of two important benefits of fixed networks. First, utilities are finding that the data collection features of AMI systems provide accurate information for meeting government auditing requirements (see sidebar).

Moreover, the industry is moving towards sharing data, as evidenced by last year’s AWWA conference, “The Open Water Data Initiative–Unifying Water Data for the Nation.” The conference was a collaborative effort of the AWWA, the White House Climate Data Initiative, the Federal Geographic Data Committee, and the Advisory Committee on Water Information. The Initiative aims to integrate fragmented water information that is already being collected by different agencies at several levels of government, and gather it into a connected, for related articles: national water data framework. www.waterefficiency.net Second, AMI networks are designed with multiple levels of JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 15

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CLEAN WATER SERVICES

When Clean and Fresh Turns Into One Big Mess The wipe obsession has led to piles of problems and growing costs.

By Carol Brzozowski

M

illions of dollars are being lost by wastewater utilities in their effort to address a growing problem: socalled flushable wipes and other products that are not breaking down easily in the sewer system. Those millions of dollars wasted on a problem that is avoidable comes on the heels of a recession and the challenges presented by an aging infrastructure.

According to the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), utilities are spending money sending employees out to respond to overflows to clean such products out of pipes, pumps, and plants.

Although only human waste and toi-

let paper should be going down the toilet, people are flushing a host of harmful materials: wipes, paper towels, feminine hygiene products, dental floss, pharmaceuticals, and product additives such as triclosan. Fats, oils, and grease (FOG) are also being disposed of improperly down garbage disposals and in toilets. The wipe problem is three-pronged and involves wipes manufacturer responsibility, consumer behavior, and a wastewater utility infrastructure not equipped to deal with the challenge.

“It’s not so much the pipe material, but perhaps the age of the pipe and its condition,” says Cynthia Finley, NACWA’s director of regulatory affairs. “Certainly, older clay pipes can have a lot of

root intrusion. You can have that happen in any pipe. The underground system is imperfect. Grounds shift, pipes crack, and tree roots get in, so then when you have obstructions, it makes it a lot easier for wipes and other things to get caught on those and start a clog.”

Different pumps will react differently based on the way they operate, their age, and the volume of material being handled, says Finley. “Wastewater collection systems and treatment plants are so variable throughout the country and there are many different types of conditions you can encounter,” she adds.

The challenge also is an inadvertent result of water conservation.

Finley points out that when high

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efficiency toilets first came out, “they didn’t necessarily flush things as easily, so there was a tendency for some people to not put too much down the toilet.”

Aubrey Strause, P.E., who owns Verdant Water in Scarborough, ME, says, “It’s only becoming more of a problem because in California, there are a lot of programs that incentivize residents to put in ultra-low-flush toilets.” People are no longer as cautious with what goes down, “which exacerbates the problem because there is less water pushing these products into the municipal sewer system or septic system.”

Today’s low-flow, high-efficiency toilets “have such good flushing power, you can get a ton of stuff down them and even if it doesn’t cause problems in the household system, it gets into the sewer system and the problems arise there,” says Finley.

In 2008, NACWA started hearing reports from public wastewater utilities, and in 2009 the complaints began to increase. “Our members asked us if we were doing anything on this issue,” says Finley. “We started working with the Water Environment Federation on it because their collection system committee had also been talking about the issue.”

In 2013, the group started to collaborate with INDA, the trade association representing the nonwoven fabrics industry, when it issued its third edition of its voluntary flushability guidelines.

“We sent a letter to them in 2013 disagreeing with their new flushability guidelines, which they published anyway at that point,” says Finley. “That started a more in-depth conversation with them to find some solutions.”

Not only are there not any viable solutions in sight, says Finley, but she says the problem is worsening. “There are so many people using wipes now in the bathroom setting, and flushing them, most likely because they don’t understand the difference between a wipe that will actually break apart in the sewer system or in their own household plumbing and when that won’t,” she says.

“Most baby wipes can’t even be ripped—they just stretch and stretch because they are made of plastic and they’re very strong,” she adds. “The flushable wipes usually pull apart a little

Mess resulting from wipes clogging a sewer line

bit more easily, but if you put them in water, stir them around and compare them to how toilet paper breaks up, you can easily see that the wipe doesn’t break up in the same way that toilet paper does.”

The clogging problem may start anywhere in the system. “There are definitely a lot of homeowners who have had problems in their own systems, which has led to several class action lawsuits going on now,” says Finley. “The good thing is that when it happens there, people react quickly with not flushing that stuff once their plumber tells them what the problem is. It’s an expensive lesson to learn, unfortunately.”

If they get out of the household pipes and make into the collection system, and on to a pump station, “they often get caught in the pumps. Especially if you add FOGs, it creates a huge mass of wipes,” says Finley. “Then going all the way to the treatment plant, every piece of equipment in the treatment plant can end up getting wipes on it.”

At first, NACWA officials believed wipes to be a problem with smaller systems that have smaller pipes and smaller pumps. “Now we’re finding it in bigger pieces of equipment, too,” says Finley, referencing New York City. “Initially, we thought it was just the collection system, but they’re making it all the way into the treatment plant now.”

THE PROBLEM: CASE STUDIES Strause—whose company provides services in stormwater management and wastewater infrastructure asset management and who also is an associate with Fuss & O’Neill, a civil and environmental engineering consulting firm—took an interest in the problem of wipes clogging wastewater systems in 2009 when she became involved in the Maine Wastewater Control Association, now known as the Maine Water Environment Association.

Maine’s wastewater facilities and collection systems operators would complain to her about an ongoing problem with ragging (when wipes clog the system).

“They had to take their pumps down all of the time, taking out piles and piles of what they were calling rags, and it took a little while for me to realize they’re talking about different types of wipes,” says Strause.

The association conducted a study in early 2011 and of the 58 responses from across the state, 90% indicated they were having problems and 40% indicated that they have had more than 10 incidents in the previous year. The estimated cost of addressing it was nearly $600,000 or an average of $37,500 per town.

As the wipes market has grown, the challenges associated with them in wastewater systems have increased, says

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In Maine Portland, ME, spent $4.5 million installing screens in two pump stations.

“We estimated based on the capital costs of those screens, and the labor and disposal of the wipes, we were paying $800 per dry pound of wipes,” notes Michelle Clements, a spokeswoman for the Portland (ME) Water District.

Scott Firmin, director of Portland (ME) Wastewater Services, says the reason for the expenditure for the pump upgrades is that one of the stations normally pumps about two million gallons per day, but during wet weather, the flows can increase.

“That pump station is designed to operate at about 15 million gallons per day,” he says. “That required three pumps running. The pumps would plug one after another and we could only keep two pumps running very inefficiently. Instead of pumping 15 million gallons, we would only be pumping something like nine million gallons.

That extra six million gallons was overflowing directly into the water. When these materials interfere with a gravity sewer, a pump station, a pump, a treatment plant, or even a residential home septic system, they will cause sewage to go someplace where it wasn’t intended to go. That’s normally the environment.”

In Maine, it was going into the Penobscot River.

“The goal of the Clean Water Act is to make waters so they are swimmable, fishable, and recreation can occur,” says Firmin. “If we’re discharging raw sewage into them, it makes it difficult to meet the objectives of the Clean Water Act.” “We’re a regional wastewater provider and the pump station was in Westbrook, ME, so we were really focused on trying to bring about change for that pump station where there are about 6,000 users,” says Clements. “We did some studies there to find out what actually was being flushed.”

Wipes are a product that is different than anything else that existed historically, says Firmin.

“We have raised this as an issue that our customers ought to be aware of because there are also instances where these products can clog a lateral line and that has a more immediate impact on that customer,” he says. “Until such time as there is a flushable product that is also degradable in water the way standard toilet paper is, it’s going to be a problem for utilities.”

In New Hampshire Non-flushable products have been creating issues in Keene, NH, for “quite some time,” notes Eric Swope, industrial pretreatment coordinator for the Keene Wastewater Treatment Plant.

In addition to whatever costs Keene has incurred from inappropriate items in

the sewer system itself, “there are additional costs from wipes and other items plugging pumps and catching on impellers and other equipment at the wastewater treatment plant,” adds Swope.

“In recent years, we have gotten much better at addressing nonflushables and other blockage-creating problems,” says Swope. “In addition to our public education efforts on nonflushables and grease, we have addressed this by improving our sewer cleaning and de-rooting and have done some replacement of old sewers, all of which helps to keep things flowing.”

Keene is one of many New Hampshire wastewater utilities that have been struggling with the problem of wipes clogging, notes Ray Gordon, septage coordinator for the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.

“Years ago, you would have a little bit of stuff flushed down the drain and the pumps could handle most of it and occasionally there’d be a problem,” says Gordon.

New Hampshire notes many more clogging incidents as the number of wipe products enter the market, including baby wipes, make-up wipes, and cleaning wipes.

To help mitigate the problem, Gordon has joined efforts with Maine leaders.

“There are only 1.5 million people in New Hampshire,” says Gordon. “We’re a small state and there are cities larger than us. Our resources are not what they BUCKMAN WASTEWATER TREATMENT PLANT, JACKSONVILLE, FL

Strause, adding that the problem is not just domestic, but global, as operators in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and the Middle East are all working on the issue.

Strause has compiled a Google map dotted with all of the different areas in the US that have reported the problem.

To understand the problem, utilities have to dig deep into the material.

Due to limited data on the nature of the interferences, the Maine Wastewater Treatment Association has a standard operating procedure (SOP) for helping utilities evaluate materials in pump clogs and sewer obstructions in order to assist the industry in understanding the extent of the problem, characterize the materials responsible for the interferences, and determine how to ultimately solve the problem.

Details on the SOP are available at www.mewea.org/PumpClogSOP.pdf.

The Buckman Wastewater Treatment Plant in Jacksonville, FL

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In Oregon Clean Water Services is a county service district servicing about 550,000 people west of Portland, OR, in 12 cities and a larger unincorporated area. The service area includes substantial industrial centers, including Nike’s world headquarters and Intel’s largest regional operations.

Clean Water Services provides wastewater collection and treatment and surface water management, stream flow restoration, and stream corridor restoration, says Bill Gaffi, general manager.

Wipes have created problems in the area by clogging pumps. “On gravity lines that are older concrete lines where the aggregate has become exposed, it attaches to the line and it requires more frequent cleaning,” says Gaffi.

The problem has influenced some equipment selection that offers less

tendency for ragging, says Gaffi. Clean Water Services has invested in new pumps that cost 10–20% more but are better equipped to handle wipe products. Managers say the overall cost is reduced by money saved on time invested in maintenance and repairs caused by clogs.

Gaffi says the wipes issue is “very similar in some respects to other topics we as an industry have to get our arms around. It’s when certain materials are introduced into the environment whether they are toxic or not. It would be a lot easier and more appropriate to keep them out of the environment rather than try to deal with them once they’re in the environment.”

if they are flushable, that should be inconsequential as far as the sewer system is concerned, but it turns out a lot of things you can flush down the toilet are not such good things to have in the system. It’s amazing what you find. We’ve encountered things as large as bedsheets.

“They may be flushable to the extent that they don’t get stuck in the toilet, but they do accumulate in the system and can result in overflows if the accumulation at the pump stations is not attended to in a timely fashion. Our operators would say that the flushable wipes are not made of a material that degrades in the system such as they easily pass through a pump.”

PHOTOS: ORANGE COUNTY, CA, SANITATION DISTRICT

would be in a huge metropolitan area, so we try to share the resources at the local level.”

Gordon distributes brochures from booths at public events and sends materials to New Hampshire municipalities to get them started on public education efforts over what to flush and not flush.

“You either train people not to flush stuff down the drain or you upgrade the equipment,” he says. “If we can stop a few people from dumping some things down the drain, there is less going down and maybe it will lessen the problem.

We incur the cost of printing a few brochures and hope for the best. The more that message is out there, the greater the chance someone will learn from it.

“I don’t think we’re going to stop people from flushing everything down the toilet. But certainly we can reduce it to a level where the towns don’t have to spend so much money replacing the equipment.”

Firmin says his organization started seeing pumps clogging on a more frequent basis more than 10 years ago.

“The point of contention with the wipes manufacturers is their claim that there is a differentiation between products intended to be flushed and products not intended to be flushed,” he says.

“Personally, I refer to them as flushed wipes because it doesn’t matter to me whether it was intended to be flushed or not—we find that if they clog the pump, it’s a problem.”

In Florida In Florida’s Miami-Dade County Water & Sewer Department, “we’ve experienced what I think a lot of utilities have in an increase in the problem of materials that form these rags—a combination of fibrous materials—that can be associated with the so-called flushable wipes,” says Doug Yoder, deputy director for operations.

The distinction between flushable and degradable is probably not a distinction that people make when they buy the products, says Yoder.

“They’re obviously assuming that

Clogged equipment (above) due to non-flushable material that has been flushed (right)

Yoder says the problem is noticeably worse in some pump stations.

“We’re looking at pump impellers that are designed to be able to cut through these materials and convey them in a chopped-up form through the pumps to see if that helps to improve the situation,” he says.

Yoder says this must be immediately addressed with equipment upgrades “because consumer behavior or

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producer responsibility hasn’t caught up,” adding that it’s difficult to quantify labor costs dealing with clogs caused by flushable wipes versus other items.

While some utilities operate their collection system largely on the basis of gravity, south Florida does not have that type of terrain. Miami-Dade has more than 1,000 pump stations in the 7,000 miles of sewer lines that move material to the treatment plants.

“We probably experience it a lot more in the conveyance system than some of the other utilities do where the concentration would be at the plants rather than in the pump station,” Yoder says of the clogs. “We get some of it out where it clogs up the pump stations, but not all.”

More or Less Everywhere The Orange County Sanitation District in California had conducted a study in 2012 on the dispersion of wipe products labeled as “flushable,” “biodegradable,” and “safe for sewer and septic systems.”

The study showed that toilet paper rapidly dispersed after 20 seconds, but the wet wipes do not break down after 24 hours, remaining intact and recognizable.

“The inability of products to disperse may adversely affect sanitary sewer systems, lift stations, and wastewater treatment plants,” staff advises.

Tracy Stevens, a lab tech at the Spokane (WA) Wastewater Treatment Plant, also has tested the products and created

a video used in wastewater treatment plant outreach efforts nationwide that shows the products don’t break down.

She also provides a DVD to interested utilities.

“If you think about smoking and littering and pollution in general, those have been extremely visible issues ever since I was a child and this is not a visible issue,” she says. “It’s complete invisibility once people flush unless their own home system backs up or someone they know has a back-up.”

Even if people are aware of the issue, “they may think ‘I’m just one person—this won’t make a difference’ or ‘I pay a lot for my utility bills and I’m not making a big difference in the cost of it.’ It takes everyone to stop doing it so the pumps stop getting clogged up and stopped having to be replaced and we stop having to devote massive labor hours to this.”

CONSUMER BEHAVIOR AND PUBLIC EDUCATION “We have seen in some of the surveys we have done that between 40 and 60% of people are using baby wipes for everything,” says Clements. “They’re not just using them for babies anymore.

There’s an interest in the hygiene aspect; they’re easy and they’re convenient.”

NACWA’s Finley, a mother of four, acknowledges that wipes are convenient.

“I use them for a lot of things I don’t need to use them for because they are just so darned convenient,” she says.

“They are packaged, ready to go, and they work really well. My youngest just got out of diapers, but I still have baby wipes in the car and house.”

Although practices such as recycling, wearing seat belts, and the reduction in cigarette smoking have come about from “peer pressure,” Finley points out that monitoring public behavior with respect to flushing wipes down the toilet is trickier.

“I think that although the change will never be complete—there are always some things that are going to be flushed—it could be improved,” she says. “Maybe we’ll be bringing utilities down into spending thousands of dollars instead of millions a year to deal with it.

That’s my hope. When you look at comments on articles that are posted online, you do see people talking about how they clogged up their household plumbing and will never flush anything like that down the toilet again or that they had no idea what happens to that stuff.”

Finley says there’s only been one study that’s demonstrated the effectiveness of public education: that study was done by INDA, which teamed up with the Maine Water Environment Association to do a professionally produced eight-week multimedia pilot public education program in early 2014 at a cost of $113,000.

“They measured the amount of wipes and other materials coming into a pump station prior to the campaign and then they did it for about a month after the campaign as well to see if it made a difference,” says Finley.

The campaign was deemed successful, as the amount of material that was flushed into the system fell off “fairly dramatically” after the campaign, she says, adding that it’s proof that people do alter their behavior when they become aware.

Because of the cost of the campaign, Clements says she would have been disappointed if the utility hadn’t seen results, but after the campaign stopped, the amount of wipes being flushed shot up again. “For wastewater facilities, that kind of investment is not sustainable,” she adds.

Those results showed the wastewater treatment industry needs more than just getting out the message once or in a short time period, says Finley, adding JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 21

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to help out.

Although he can’t quantify it, since the educational efforts began, it seems like the number of blockages has decreased, notes Swope.

Clean Water Services’ educational efforts include a song titled “Don’t Flush the Baby (Wipes),” written and performed by Steve Anderson, a Clean Water Services water resources analyst, as well as posters and cartoons about the proper disposal of wipes.

“I think they’re having some impact,” says Gaffi. “We have a tremendous challenge in terms of accessing public attention.

There’s such tremendous competition for eyeballs.”

Clean Water Services makes annual presentations to 4,000 fourth graders “in trying to get their help in getting attention and response from their parents as well,” notes Gaffi. “That’s been a pretty effective strategy.”

NACWA and INDA promote the slogan: “Toilets Are Not Trash Cans.”

Strause conducts a course for municipal wastewater operators that includes a handson session of testing dozens of wipes to determine which ones break down.

Attendees discuss legislative efforts and why they fail, current class action suits, and getting out accurate public education messages.

“If we’re telling people to not flush wipes but what is showing up in our system is baby wipes, then we’re missing those opportunities,” she says. “The consumer doesn’t realize that they’re different products. The utilities have to focus their very limited resources and very limited education dollars on the right product and the actual culprit.”

SMITH & LOVELESS

that it must be sustained to “really change tune of “O, Christmas Tree.” people’s behavior.”

The city of Keene, NH, worked It is possible, she says. Middle-aged, with students at Keene High School to Finley says she remembers a time when no produce a public service announcement one wore seatbelts or recycled products. titled “Don’t Flush That.”

“Now, I wouldn’t dream of riding in Swope compiled lyrics for the music a car without my seatbelts on and we feel video; the students put together the story funny if we have to throw away paper or line and scenes. Keene’s efforts demona glass bottle if we can’t find a recycling strate that a utility doesn’t have to invest bin for it,” she says. “Things can change. a lot of money in educational efforts. It’s It takes time—maybe on a 20-year range, beneficial for the city and gives students but we have to get started on this and get a chance to develop multimedia skills in people to realize when you flush someaddition to being exposed to a message thing down a toilet, it doesn’t disappear. It’s going through a sewer system to a treatment plant and eventually getting discharged into your lakes and rivers and oceans.”

While there are a host of other products being flushed, the focus is on wipes because they are marketed as flushable, says Finley.

“To us as utilities, we really want to get to those wipes first,” she says. “We think the message needs to be brought out to the public as quickly as possible. We are working with X-PELLER pump from Smith & Loveless the wipes industry on this. We have a product stewardship initiative. We’re starting to that they may incorporate into their own take a look at consumer education and practices, and encourage other family better labeling of products.” members to do so, much like anti-cigaPart of the consumer behavior is rette smoking campaigns. attributable to the mass media, which proKeene has included educational motes personal hygiene habits as Mehmet inserts with Swope’s contact informaOz has done on his program. tion into the water and sewer bills. Some “He was promoting these things and people called him to discuss the probafter realizing how big the problem was, lem, he says. he changes his mind and goes back to Swope also does targeted education toilet paper,” says Finley, who appeared efforts when field colleagues contact him as a guest on one of his shows in which after noting a significant amount of rags he announced his 180-degree turn and in a blockage on a specific street. promoted moistening toilet paper with “I’ll take a look at our sewer maps, water instead. see what is upstream of that and put Utilities are employing a variety of together a list of houses in the immedipublic education efforts to get the mesate vicinity, especially for the smaller sage out. They’ve become creative in their area being covered by the sewer,” he says. approaches, such as New Water in Green Swope puts together a mailer Bay, WI, which created a holiday video informing the residents of the problem in 2014 in which staff members dressed and the hazards that caused the blockage up in holiday garb singing “O Love Your which may have resulted in an overflow Pipes, Don’t Flush Those Wipes” to the and instructs them on what they can do

MANUFACTURER RESPONSIBILITY When she learned of the problem with clogging by wipes, Strause says she thought the problem would be as easy to fix as instructing wipes manufacturers to stop labeling the products that are not flushable as flushable, and the ones

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not labeled as flushable should have a “do not flush” label on them.

“They’d make the packaging changes and it will be fine,” she adds. “I had no idea what I was getting involved with.

That was 2009 and here we are, still struggling with the exact same issues with the exact same manufacturers.”

Dave Rousse, the president of INDA, as mentioned earlier the trade association representing the nonwoven fabrics industry, says “we are working collaboratively with NACWA and three other wastewater associations to address what we acknowledge is a problem they’re experiencing with much debris in their wastewater systems, the debris being wipes.”

Rousse says INDA has conducted forensic analyses showing the wipes causing the problems are not wipes marketed as flushable.

“There are many kinds of wipes out there made from many different materials,” he says. “The wipes our industry is marketing as flushable are specially constructed from cellulosic materials which ultimately biodegrade. These fibers are short fibers compared with other wipes which are made with long fibers.

Short fibers enable them to disentangle more readily and are oftentimes made with chemical binders that release upon exposure to the wastewater itself or based on the bonding process of the fibers, they disentangle upon hitting the wastewater.”

Those wipes, marketed to be flushed, pass the seven tests of the industry flushability assessment guidelines and represent only 7% of wipes marketed, says Rousse.

“The other 93% of the wipes contain some of the problem-makers for the wastewater industry,” he says. “But that 93% of wipes were never designed to be flushed, never marketed to be flushed, and oftentimes carry instructions that say ‘do not flush.’ But people flush them anyway inappropriately and those wipes are very capable of causing the problems in wastewater, along with paper towels and feminine hygiene items and dental floss and many other things that shouldn’t be flushed.

“Consumers should pay attention to proper disposal instructions, and our industry is trying to do a much better job of providing those proper disposal instructions through more prominently

displaying our very effective ‘do not flush’ symbol on the packaging.”

Still, there are products on the market that tests from within the wastewater industry have shown to be marketed as flushable but are not decomposable.

“I would tell you there has been a lot of innovative activity in our industry over the last five years, all in a direction of having the wipe materials lose their strength more quickly upon release into the wastewater system,” says Rousse.

“This is exactly the direction that the wastewater industry would like us to go. It’s exactly the direction we’d like to go. It is an engineering design challenge that the wipe has to have enough strength to do its job when it’s required to, but releases strength quickly.”

His industry is meeting that challenge, contends Rousse.

“Today’s materials release their strength far more quickly than the materials of a few years ago,” he adds.

NACWA’s Finley says there are some wipes that are meeting INDA’s flushability guidelines and some that are not; there is no product consistency.

“Utilities still recommend against flushing wipes, even if they are labeled flushable,” says Finley. “There are simply no standards being met across the industry to ensure that a flushable wipe is actually flushable. People are still having problems with their household plumbing and they’re still causing problems in the municipal plumbing because of flushable wipes that aren’t truly flushable or flushing wipes that were never meant to be flushed at all, such as baby wipes, which are very strong and can cause all sorts of problems in the system.”

Product stewardship is focused on a labeling code of practice, says Finley.

INDA has created a “do not flush” logo.

“It’s a perfectly fine logo, but the problem is when manufactures choose to use it, they’re often hiding it on the back of the package and even under the flap,” she says. “Clearly manufacturers have not done a good enough job of labeling wipes that aren’t supposed to be flushed with the ‘do not flush’ logo or instructions.

“The manufacturers are improving the labeling of their product and adopting the code of practice, but if you actually go look in the store, the percentage of products with that label in a place

where the consumer is actually going to see it is pretty small. That code of practice has been in place for two years now, and the progress on it has just been much too slow.”

The national initiative to address new manufacturing guidelines includes INDA, NACWA, the American Public Works Association, Water Environment Federation, and the Canadian Water & Wastewater Association.

The group worked collaboratively on the joint development of a new edition of guidelines that will influence product design and support the marketing of nonwoven products that are flushable with no adverse effects on wastewater systems.

The fourth edition of the voluntary flushability guidelines is expected to be released sometime after July 2016. The group also explored a product stewardship initiative to promote greater responsibility for the proper disposal of nonwoven products, including wipes not designed to be flushed.

The group seeks improvement in the labeling of wipes that are not designed to be flushed, as well as the development of strategies for a broader consumer education effort about the proper disposal of wipes.

“One of the things that was brought up was many of the companies that manufacture these products also have very strong statements about corporate responsibility to the environment and sustainability and so the thought was that rather than to talk to the marketing people as far as simply selling flushable wipes, there would be a larger appeal to the sustainability efforts of these collective companies,” says Portland, ME’s Firmin.

“We believe the labeling of products needs to improve,” he adds. “More importantly, the properties of the products need to improve because it’s one thing to put a label on a baby wipe that it works very well for personal cleaning but suggests you don’t flush it. If it is for personal cleaning, people are going to flush it because it’s got material on there that they would normally flush down their toilet.”

The wipes industry has said there are “simply economic and consumer preference barriers right now to making more dispersible products,” says Firmin.

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LAWS AND LAWSUITS Some government entities, such as the states of Maine, New Jersey, and California, have tried enacting legislation to deal with the issue, notes Finley.

“It sounds like a good idea to outlaw flushable wipes or say all flushable wipes have to truly be flushable,” she says.

“The reason NACWA hasn’t supported anything like that is because we don’t yet have a standard for calling something flushable. Without that, it’s hard to say a wipe has to meet a certain standard and in fact, it could end up worse if you were

to outlaw any wipes from being called flushable. Then you end up with baby wipes on the shelf and people are still flushing baby wipes, even though they’re not meant to be flushed. The genie is out of the bottle on people wanting something more than toilet paper.”

Class action suits and government involvement appears to be making some inroads into the problem. In one of the most significant actions regarding wipes manufacturer responsibility, Nice-Pak Products Inc., a manufacturer of wet wipes, agreed to stop advertising moist toilet tissue as flushable unless it can

are safe for sewer systems and septic systems, break apart shortly after being flushed, and are safe to flush.

The company’s tests did not reflect real-world household plumbing or septic conditions, according to the FTC. “It was a two-layer wipe where one layer was actually made out of plastic and that thing could not break down at all when it was flushed,” says Finley.

“The requirement in that consent agreement from the FTC of Nice-Pak is providing the basis for us to move forward to make sure that any wipe that passes the new guidelines would match the

PORTLAND, ME, WATER DISTRICT

“People would rather buy a cheaper tin of baby wipes and use them than pay twice what baby wipes cost for something that’s flushable and dispersible.

Ultimately, there needs to be a product that is more dispersible and something that meets consumer needs while recognizing how consumers are going to use them. People won’t throw fecal matter into their trash cans.”

The initiative may expand to include other consumer products that are commonly flushed and cause problems in wastewater systems, such as paper towels, feminine hygiene products, cotton swabs, and other materials.

Better labeling also will help, says Verdant Water’s Strause. She credits Kimberly-Clark for doing a good job labeling the Huggies brand in a visible spot on the package. Nice-Pak, which is now under a consent agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, has put the “do not flush” logo on its Parent’s Choice wipes sold at Wal-Mart, she says.

Product display also influences consumer behaviors. Retailers can contribute to the problem by displaying all types of wipes—flushable and non-flushable—in the same space, says Strause.

“In the consumer’s mind, these products are the same,” she says. “People look at these different price points, but they think all of the products are the same type and that’s partially why we have such a misuse of products.

“We want that logo to be much bigger,” she says. “It doesn’t need to be on the front, but it needs to be where the consumer can see it. Even the biggest companies in the country that make baby wipes are not putting that message in a place where the consumers can see it.”

The “What the Flush?” game show was part of the Portland, ME, Water District’s campaign to educate local residents on what is safe to flush.

substantiate that the product is safe to flush under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).

The company also agreed to not claim that its moist toilet tissue is safe for sewer and septic tanks unless it has substantiation for those claims.

According to the FTC, Nice-Pak will stop providing trade customers, such as retailers, with information to make such unsubstantiated claims. Costco, CVS, Target, and BJ’s Wholesale Club were Nice-Pak customers that sold, under their own private labels, the formulation of the company’s moist toilet tissue that was the subject of the complaint.

The FTC contends that Nice-Pak violated the FTC Act by misrepresenting that a certain formulation of its wipes

requirements in the consent agreement.”

TECHNOLOGY UPGRADES Pump manufacturers are responding to the wipe clogging problem with upgraded technology.

Thompson Pump has developed a self-cleaning impeller system to handle clogging caused by flushable wipes while saving energy.

The Thompson Self Cleaning Impeller System consists of a semi-open impeller with specially designed backward swept inclined vanes, together with a serrated and v-notched wearplate for pulling debris and stringy material away from the impeller vanes to reduce clogging risks.

The Thompson Self Cleaning Impeller System can be added to any existing

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Thompson JS series pump. To install, the closed impeller is removed and the semiopen impeller and wear plate is installed.

For severe unscreened wastewater applications, an optional auger attachment is available to aid in conveying rags and stringy materials through the pump.

Citing water conservation efforts that have increased the percentage of solids in wastewater environments and new disposable items with synthetic reinforcements that have become problematic for wastewater systems, Julia Everman, spokesperson for Crane Pumps & Systems, says the issue makes clog resistance capability “all the more important in solids handling pumps.”

Crane Pumps & Systems introduced a line of submersible solids handling pumps with non-recessed Vortex impellers that pass these solids without clogging by providing sufficient radial velocity to move the wipes and other related matter out of the pump, she says.

The Barnes brand SHV and XSHV pumps are available in 3-, 6-, and 8-inch sizes. Vertical Smith & Loveless NonClog Pumps are designed to meet the 10 States Standard for 3-inch solids handling.

For applications with high volumes of flushables, the custom-trimmed, dual-port pump impeller is designed to be simply replaced with the X-PELLER. Its mono-port design creates a single flow path through the impeller, thereby negating the common buildup of fibrous material from today’s flushables in multi-vane pump impellers.

The X-PELLER’s ability to easily pass 3-inch solids and problem flushables is in its design that counterbalances the hydraulic forces at play inside the pump volute in order to maintain balance during operation.

The X-PELLER can handle flows from 75–500 gallons per minute (GPM) for 4-inch pumps and 200–1,000 GPM for 6-inch pumps. The impeller is designed to operate at 900, 1,200, and 1,800 rpm. Pumps from other vertical pump brands can be outfitted with the X-PELLER if the rotating assembly is replaced. Each X-PELLER impeller is custom-trimmed by Smith & Loveless for each application to meet specific pumping conditions.

Bob Domkowski, business develop-

ment manager for transport pumping and amusement markets and engineering consultant for Xylem Inc., Water Solutions USA–Flygt, notes the problems that wipes have been causing for wastewater utilities affect energy efficiency and lead to the need for retrofits.

What should take a lift station five or 10 minutes to accomplish ends up taking a half hour because the impeller can no longer operate at its best efficiency, he adds.

Better screening and adjustable speed drives provide the most benefit for utilities, as do “smart” drives, says Domkowski. Xylem has one product in its drive system where the data on the actual performance curve and characteristics of the pump are in a lock box in the pump drive. When the pump is activated for the first time, the drive determines how long it takes to empty a wet well, says Domkowski.

“The next time it turns on, it will start at two hertz lower speed and see how long it takes to empty the wet well and measure how much energy was used,” he says. “If it uses less energy, the next time the drive starts, it will start two hertz slower even further and keeps on doing that until it gets to the point where it costs a little bit more to empty the wet well that time, so it goes back the other way. It’s constantly searching for the best operating position.”

That results in reduced pressure and costs, deriving an energy savings benefit of 40–50% over traditional solutions and an impeller that can handle modern trash concerns, says Domkowski.

Finley points out that the two pump stations on which Portland, ME, spent significant money to retrofit in response to the wipes problem could have been used a lot longer, “but because they were having so many problems with wipes, they couldn’t just pull out one piece of equipment and put in another.

“That’s a relatively small utility,” she adds. “There are utilities all over the country that are putting in grinder

for related articles: www.waterefficiency.net

pumps to try to chop these things up as they come through and keep them from getting clogged. But when you have that happening, you’re not removing the wipes from the system, you’re just chopping them up and pushing them further down, so they are still going through your system.”

There is some evidence that the ground-up wipes can recombine into rope-like materials, says Finley.

“The material is still getting into your wastewater treatment system and end up in the biosolids. If it’s plastic baby wipes getting chopped up in to smaller pieces, then you’ve got plastic going into the biosolids and potentially small plastic pieces going out into the effluent like the microbeads that are being outlawed in many states and perhaps nationally,” she says. “Just chopping them up to get them through the system is not the answer.”

Strause says she doesn’t believe it’s necessary to get 100% of the products out of the sewer. During field visits, she notes that baby wipes, surface cleaning wipes, and facial cleaning wipes are clogging the pumps and by reducing the number of baby wipes and cleaning wipes, the intensity of the problem will diminish.

Finley agrees.

“It will definitely take a lot of public education and it will probably never be 100%,” she says. “If we can at least get a certain portion of the population to alter their behavior, we can make some progress.”

Some wipes manufacturers are working on prototypes for better products, says Finley. There also are scented sprays that can are being made for use on toilet paper so consumers don’t have to use wipes.

“We think there could be wipes that would be safe to flush, but we have to have some kind of standard for determining that,” she says. “That’s why we’re working with the other wastewater associations and with the wipes industry to develop a new fourth edition of flushability guidelines that we can all agree on that will determine if a wipe is truly safe to be flushed.” WE Carol Brzozowski specializes in topics related to water resource management and technology.

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NEPTUNE

features and benefits. AMI is more expensive, but offers almost the ultimate in features and benefits. For some utilities, particularly smaller ones with limited budgets, AMR may be all that is needed. For larger utilities, AMI may be the way to go.

However, it seems, even for utilities that initially opt for AMR, there may be value in selecting a vendor that also provides AMI, which can allow for a hybrid system from the start, or at very least allow a transition from AMR to AMI to take place smoothly in the future, when AMI may make more sense for the utility.

And, in what may surprise some, there are now some technologies that can take AMI to an even higher level.

AMR or AMI: Which Makes More Sense?

Utilities’ needs vary, and so do solutions.

By William Atkinson

P

rior to the introduction of automatic meter reading (AMR, also known as automated meter reading), water utilities had to do everything by hand. With AMR came the opportunity to utilize technology to reduce costs and improve productivity. Then

came Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI), in which technology provided advances that water utility executives could have hardly even dreamed of a decade earlier.

So which makes more sense for a water utility—AMR or AMI? In sum, AMR is less expensive, but offers less

THE CASE FOR AMR “Meter reading is a necessary, but oftentimes tedious, function of a utility company,” says Kali Gerhardt, marketing manager of global marketing for Kamstrup Water Metering. “Automating this important task helps utilities make the most of their limited time and resources. We see more and more how utilities have to do more with less.

AMR offers several time and resourcesaving benefits.”

One of Kamstrup’s customers, North City, IL, was able to reduce its reading time from 30 hours a month to just three and a half hours. Prior to AMR, the city was paying a subcontractor to do the readings, but is now able to do the readings itself.

“It is also safer to read a meter from a vehicle, which AMR allows, than to have to get out and read it manually,” says Gerhardt. “Keeping workers safe is the highest priority of all utilities, for their well-being as well as the costs associated with an injured employee.”

AMR is also cost-effective. Some of the smallest utilities have been able to reap the benefits of AMR at a cost lower than AMI technology, according to Gerhardt.

AMR does require “truck rolls,” though, as it is a drive-by system. “However, some utilities will multi-task their meter reading, meaning that, while they are out for maintenance work or other services, they will also have remote reading tools on-board and can read meters

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during that time,” she says.

One water utility that is satisfied with its AMR technology is Davie County (NC) Public Utilities, which has a water system with 11,000 service connections in a 400-square-mile service area that is divided into 30 rural reading routes. The manual process of meter reading used to take so long (50 days) that the utility district could only bill customers once every two months. In addition, misreads were common, since it was a manual/visual process.

“Davie County and its townships are growing, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to keep up, considering how long it took us to collect readings over such a wide service area,” says Johnny Lambert, director of Davie County Public Utilities. “As a result, we began researching AMR, and, since we have a bi-monthly billing cycle, we were especially interested in a solution that stored meter reads throughout the entire billing period.”

The utility ended up selecting an AMR system called HotRod, offered by

Mueller Systems. Now, a meter reader can read 3,000 meters in two days with virtually 100% accuracy. Given the size of the utility’s service area, it elected to install the new meters over a period of years. “This eased the pressure of cost all at once,” says Lambert.

Besides the increased productivity and accuracy, environmental issues and safety have improved. “We have been able to reduce the number of meter reading vehicles, which reduces CO2 emissions,” he says. “We have also reduced safety hazard exposures for employees and helped reduce accidents.”

Does the utility eventually plan to migrate to AMI? Not according to Lambert, because there is no reason to do so. “We are a rural county, and AMR will continue to fit our needs for years to come,” he says.

THE CASE FOR AMI According to Chris King, global chief regulatory officer for Siemens Smart Grid, one key difference between AMR and AMI is that, with AMI, you can get

reads on meters in real time, meaning that you can get detailed consumption every day, or even every hour, rather than once a month. One benefit of this is identifying possible leaks. “For example, if hourly information is showing that water use in continuous, it likely means that there is a leak, and the utility can reach out to the customer to alert them to the possible problem,” he says.

AMI also allows the water utility to locate system leaks, not just individual customer location leaks. This can potentially avoid a large-scale failure. “That is, if you can locate a leak early and address the problem, this can prevent a pipe from bursting later on, when the crack turns into a broken pipe,” says King.

One potential downside of AMI is that it costs more to implement than AMR. However, with features such as being able to prevent major pipe breaks, AMI systems can often pay for themselves rather quickly. “In addition, the majority of the cost of AMI is related to upgrading the meters themselves, including the electronic modules and

“Neptune’s R900® System helped our workforce efficiency. It used to take us six to eight weeks to read meters — now it’s a day and a half.”

BOB BENNETT DIRECTOR OF PUBLIC SERVICES, VILLAGE OF JOHNSON CITY

PEOPLE AND ANSWERS NEPTUNETG.COM/PRODUCTIVITY

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THE CASE FOR HYBRID AMR/AMI As Joe Ball, director of solutions marketing, North American Water, for Itron sees it, AMR and AMI each have a place in a water utility, depending on what the utility is trying to improve.

“If you do select AMR, it is important to select a system that has a good migration path to get you to AMI when you need it,” he says. “Itron offers a seamless way for a utility to migrate from one to another.”

What you get with AMR and AMI is core meter-reading and meter-to-cash functionality, which provides the ability to get data from the meter into your billing system. “With AMI, though, you get granularity of data, which provides additional value with that data from an analytics tool beyond just the meter reading and billing that both AMR and AMI offer.”

If you think AMR is initially the way to go, Ball would recommend that you also consider AMI before making that decision, especially looking at the granularity of data that you can pull from an AMI system, so that you can potentially utilize that network technology sooner than later. “For example, if you opt for AMI, instead of starting out by collecting hourly data, you can start out collecting daily data,” he says. “Then

you can move to more granular data in the future.”

An AMI network also offers the potential to go beyond metering, putting additional sensors into the network, such as distribution leak sensors, some remote shut-offs, and some pressure or water quality sensors.

According to Ball, some of Itron’s rural customers, which don’t need AMI for their whole network, utilize a hybrid system. “They use AMR for the lowdensity mobile rural routes, and then an AMI network for the denser areas,” he says. One of the features of Itron’s offerings is the ability to run that hybrid architecture, plus a smooth migration path from AMR to AMI.

NEPTUNE

communications equipment,” says King.

“However, you also have to do this [with] AMR. With AMI, though, you do have to implement the communications network, but when you divide the cost of the network over each of the meters, the ‘per node’ cost is likely to be a small amount.”

In terms of keys to success in implementing AMI, it is important to decide in advance what applications will be implemented utilizing the data, such as providing information feedback to consumers on a website they can access, which has been shown to reduce water usage by 10% or more.

“This is particularly important in states like California, where the drought is such a serious problem,” says King.

The E-CoderR900i interleaves mobile and fixed network messages to facilitate migration.

Regardless of whether your choice is AMR or AMI, the most important key to success, according to Ball, is to work with your vendor and service team to identify the goals of the project, and then put in place a good definition phase (defining the system, and defining the processes that you need to address while deploying the system) in order to make sure the system will solve the problems that you want solved.

“It is also important to do system testing and system acceptance at each phase,” he says.

Another vendor that offers both AMR and AMI is Sensus. “While we are a leader in North America in deployed AMI systems, we also do a tremendous amount of work in the AMR space,” says Dan Pinney, global water marketing

director at Sensus.

Everything Sensus does in the water area focuses on one or both of two goals.

One is to help utilities resolve nonrevenue water. The other is to help them create operational efficiencies. AMR and AMI can help with both, but AMI, of course, is more effective than AMR in doing so.

“AMR helps with creating operational efficiencies,” says Pinney. “That is, the first tangible benefit of AMR is the ability to lower your risk associated with having meter readers get out of their trucks and conduct manual readings on water meters, and, of course, the time savings that go along with that.”

Strictly from a data perspective, though, according to Pinney, the difference between a manual reading and an AMR reading is very little. “When you utilize AMR, you can add some historical data, but from a resolution standpoint, there is only an incremental change,” he says.

The additional benefit of AMI is that you gain the benefits of AMR in terms of risk reduction and time savings, but can take it further by having no one out on the road at all for even more time savings and risk reduction. In addition, the advanced, detailed resolution of the data you receive from AMI is much higher. “In other words, most of the information you can get from an AMI system you can also get from an AMR system,” says Pinney. “The benefit of AMI is the resolution of the data, the speed at which you get the data, and what you can do with that data in terms of action.”

As noted earlier, being able to transition smoothly and easily from AMR to AMI is important. “You need to select a technology that can grow with you over time,” says Pinney. For example, if you are installing an AMR system today, you are doing so in order to solve today’s problems. However, what about in five, 10, and 15 years? What problems will you be trying to solve then? And will your system be able to scale, migrate, and grow with you to help you do that?

Regardless of whether you are implementing AMR or AMI, it is important to focus on training. “You want to be sure that your organization is up-to-speed on what you are doing, why you are doing it, and how

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OAKLAND COUNTY, MI

you are doing it,” he says. “When you install AMR or AMI, it changes the way you do business.” For example, if you have someone driving along and that person receives a tamper alarm, what do you want him or her to do with that information? Do you want that person to stop and investigate? Or should he or she bring the information back to the shop and have someone else handle it?

Then how do you close the loop on that particular incident?

Neptune Technology Group also offers hybrid AMR and AMI technology. “Water utilities shouldn’t really need to make a decision on whether mobile AMR or fixed network AMI suits them best,” says Dave Hanes, director of strategic marketing. “The real decision is

where does each technology make sense, and when should it be deployed?” It’s a subtle difference, according to Hanes, but it is based on the fact that a utility should be able to deploy AMI and AMR technologies where they make sense, and at their own pace.

First and foremost, believes Hanes, the utility should look for a system that allows for the flexibility to do both mobile AMR and fixed-network AMI. Two important concepts come into play here—hybrid and migration.

A hybrid system is one in which both mobile AMR and fixed-network AMI functionality can be utilized within a single system. “For example, it might make sense to deploy mobile AMR in residential areas where the primary

driver is increased reading efficiency and accuracy,” says Hanes. “In areas where the meters are hard to access, or generate significant revenue, fixed-network AMI may make more sense.” These two approaches should work hand-in-hand within the same system architecture.

The second concept is that of migration. An endpoint that is installed for mobile AMR reading should also support fixed-network AMI operations, without the need to replace the endpoint, reprogram it, pay an increased license fee to read it, or have a shorter warranty period if it is read more frequently. “These hidden costs can be significant and are absolutely unnecessary,” says Hanes.

Once the utility has determined which system to implement to meet its hybrid and migration criteria, it can then determine where best to apply mobile AMR and fixed-network AMI operations.

One satisfied Neptune Technology Group customer is the Oakland County (MI) Water Resources Commission. In the past, the Commission was sending out about one-third of its staff every day to get manual meter readings from a portion of its 45,000 accounts.

Between the manual reads and the problem of aging meters, accuracy, and ultimately revenue, suffered. “We were really behind in meter Oakland reading and all sorts County, MI, of system mainteuses Neptune’s nance,” says Tim Artes, mobile AMR water maintenance technology. supervisor.

The Commission decided to move forward with AMR, but the first technology deployed was unsuccessful. Subsequently, the Commission selected the R900 System for mobile AMR from Neptune Technology Group. “We chose Neptune’s mobile R900 AMR technology, knowing we could extend to a fixed network system in the future, which was absolutely necessary for us,” says Jody Caldwell, chief engineer.

“The Neptune R900 was selected because it was compatible with our existing meters and enabled us to read with a drive-by meter reading system,” says Amy Ploof, P.E., of the Oakland County Commissioner’s Office.

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THE CASE FOR TECHNOLOGY BEYOND AMI While AMI may seem to be the “be all and end all” of water system technology, there are other advances that can make AMI even more effective and attractive. One of these is Advanced Metering Analytics (AMA), which is offered by Badger Meter. Badger actually offers AMR, AMI, and AMA. John Fillinger, director of utility marketing with Badger Meter, delineated the pros and cons of each. “AMR can increase accuracy and efficiency,” he says. “One thing that a lot of utilities like about AMR is that it has been around for awhile, and they don’t like to be the first to try something, so they may feel more comfortable with AMR than with AMI, in that they don’t have to step too far outside of their comfort zone in terms of technologies.”

However, according to Fillinger, AMI provides a lot of benefits that utili-

PARK CITY, UT

With Michigan’s brutal winters, meter reading efficiency is a crucial factor. “With so many accounts, and us walking routes in three feet of snow at 10 below, it wouldn’t have happened before,” says Artes. “Now, with Neptune’s mobile AMR, we can do it.”

By fall 2014, the Commission had achieved a 99% read success rate and cut its meter reading staff by half. Personnel who had spent every day reading are now free to perform other tasks.

“The costs of reading meters using the drive-by system has dropped substantially,” says Ploof. “Our estimated reads are consistently less than 2%. We believe that having a reliable meter reading system assists us in providing good customer service and has been very cost-effective.”

Currently, Neptune’s migratable AMR/AMI technology is proving flexible enough to meet the needs of each of Oakland County’s utilities and move then forward. “Neptune’s team environment has made it successful,” says Caldwell. “The R900 system was the way to go for us to move into the future.”

“We recently started operating a new water system, and we have started installing E-Coder equipped meters,” says Ploof. “We are working toward installing collectors for a fully-deployed Neptune AMI meter reading system.”

AMI radio installed in Park City’s service area

ties probably only dreamed about a few years ago. “Just as electric utilities have been introducing technologies that allow them to gather and utilize a lot of data and communicate with their customers, water utilities that want to begin doing the same thing need to consider AMI,” he says.

Before implementing AMI, Fillinger recommends that water utilities talk with all of the departments, especially engineering, to see what their needs are so that they get a system that will address all of these needs in ways that will help the utility as a whole, as well as its customers.

So what is AMA, and how does it fit in? “As utilities began installing AMI systems, one thing they appreciated was the fact that it provided more value and features,” says Fillinger. “However, they also say that the more features they were able to obtain, the more difficult it was becoming for them to manage the system, which was requiring more IT resources.” That is, water utilities wanted to focus on water, not IT. To address this need, Badger created AMA, which drives a managed-solution

software platform, eliminating the need for utilities to utilize their IT resources.

“We also didn’t want utilities to end up suffering paralysis from receiving so much data that they didn’t know what to do with it,” he says. As such, AMA takes the data coming in, compares it with the business rules that are set up by that utility, and instead of an operator having to run reports to understand what is happening in the system, the AMA software

WaterSmart Software’s online customer portal, which provides leak notifications

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BADGER METER

does that automatically.

One utility that has gone one step beyond AMI with another technology is the Park City (UT) Water Department.

“We had an AMR system in place, but the city council made decision to implement AMI in 2009, selecting the same vendor that we already had for our AMR system,” says Jason Christensen, water resources manager. Park City invested in AMI to track water usage in real time, and the city council approved the costly deployment with the promise of rapid leak detection and long-term cost savings in mind.

“One reason for the decision to introduce AMI is that we have a progressive tiered rate system, so when customers experience leaks, they can get expensive very quickly,” says Christensen. With the old AMR system, some of the meters in the system were driveby, and some were touch-read. However, regardless of which reading approach was used, it could take up to 45 days to identify leaks on customer property, and even longer to notify the customers of the leaks.

AMI would solve this problem, allowing the utility to provide information to customers much more quickly.

AMI was mostly deployed by end of 2010 (about 98%) and fully deployed by 2013 (the remaining 2% that represented special situations).

“AMI is fantastic in terms of billing,” says Christensen. “It also allows

WATERSMART

Badger Meter’s AMA software is accessible on various interfaces.

us to manage our radios and meters better than we were able to with AMR, in that we know quickly when there is a problem in the field and can dispatch someone to fix that quickly.”

However, while the utility reaped a significant number of benefits from AMI, this didn’t necessarily translate into benefits for customers. “We were still having to manually look through the data to find customers who might have a leak and then call them on the phone or send them an e-mail,” he says.

At this point, the utility partnered with WaterSmart Software and created an online customer portal. WaterSmart provides home—and recently commercial—water conservation reports, and handles leak notification for the utility, automatically notifying customers when there is information that might indicate a leak. The WaterSmart software automatically e-mails water reports to engage customers to log on and utilize the customer portal. The portal allows users to view a detailed analysis of their water use and offered personalized water savings recommendations.

The utility integrated its AMI interval data with the WaterSmart leak detection technology. The software can differentiate sources of indoor water use in order to pinpoint the location and size of the leak, and send a customized suggestion on how to fix it.

In addition, the Utility Analytics Dashboard of WaterSmart helps utility

staff view all of the leak alerts in the city and notify customers who have not yet logged onto the customer portal of the potential leak.

Park City integrated WaterSmart software with its AMI data platform and delivered its first home water reports in May 2014.

“With the customer portal connected to the AMI system, we send monthly home water reports letting people know how much water they are using compared to similarly-situated people,” says Christensen. “WaterSmart then pushes specific notifications to people who might have a leak.”

During the first month (May 2014), the utility was able to identify and deliver over 150 leak alerts to residents, 70% of which were addressed within ten days of notification. In the last two weeks of July 2015, 42% of the 78 leaks that opened were alerted. During that same time period the year before, only 18% of the 101 leaks that opened were alerted. WE William Atkinson is a business writer specializing in infrastructure and sustainability.

for related articles: www.waterefficiency.net

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Climate-Ready Water Utilities The evolving new normal By Carol Brzozowski

A

fter preparing a climate change plan for her community’s wastewater treatment plant, Carol Murray, interim director for the Manchester Department of Public Works in Manchester-by-the-Sea, MA, says if she would have done anything differently, she would have started working on the plan seven years ago.

Doing a climate change plan with the help of EPA “is one of those reality checks that really makes you stop and think,” notes Murray.

Her advice to other water and wastewater utilities: start doing climate change plans now.

“You’re a little bit behind the curve, but it’s still in advance of things hitting you,” she says. “Find out what you are facing so you are ready to start positioning yourself.”

Murray’s is one of dozens of US water and wastewater utilities preparing plans for the potential impacts from

climate change. Some work with EPA; others are acting independently.

The term “climate ready” more reflects a process than any specific end state—a process resulting in the utility’s ability to withstand, respond, and recover effectively and efficiently from climate impacts, notes EPA spokesperson Robert Daguillard.

“Water sector utility climate readiness varies due to system size, type, geographic location, climate impact, and vulnerable infrastructure,” he says.

“Utilities must first understand their potential future climate projections and the vulnerability of their assets to climate change impacts.”

In 2010, EPA requested the formation of a working group under the National Drinking Water Advisory Council to define what it means to be “climate ready” from the perspective of water sector utilities, including drinking water, wastewater, and stormwater.

The group delivered its findings in a

January 2011 report to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson (the full report can be found at www.epa.gov/climateready utilities). The findings and recommendations became the foundation of EPA’s voluntary Climate Ready Water Utilities (CRWU) initiative.

Extreme weather events, sea level rise, shifting precipitation patterns and temperature variability—all intensified by climate change—have significant water sector implications and were the driving factors for the initiative, says Daguillard.

“The EPA has the responsibility to assist water sector utilities in planning for, assessing, and adapting to climate impacts so that they can continue to fulfill their public health and environmental missions, as well as begin the process of becoming more climate-ready,” he adds.

The CRWU initiative involves a suite of tools designed to be practical and user-friendly to translate complex climate projections into accessible and actionable information for utility owners

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CAPITAL REGION WATER, HARRISBURG, PA

and operators. The climate science data is derived from the same climate model data and studies used for the 2014 US Global Change Research Program’s National Climate Assessment.

The agency also has reached out to thousands of water utilities through inperson training workshops and webinars.

In 2014 and 2015, EPA partnered with and assisted 23 communities in conducting a climate risk assessment using its Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT) and plans to assist 10 more in 2016.

“CREAT assists drinking water and wastewater utility owners and operators in understanding potential climate change impacts and in assessing the related risks at their utilities,” says Daguillard.

The tool helps utilities evaluate adaptive options to address potential climate change impacts using both traditional risk assessment and scenariobased decision making. Version 2.0 is available for free download.

WEST With drought having been on the radar for a significant amount of time in the West, many utilities have begun to plan for future scenarios regarding water shortages. Case in point: Seattle Public Utilities (SPU), which provides drinking water to 1.4 million people in the Seattle region and provides wholesale water to cities and water districts in the suburbs.

SPU also is a drainage, stormwater, and wastewater utility for Seattle.

The utility’s climate change planning efforts date to the late 1990s when some of its water managers took interest in how the El Niño-Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycle affects water supply.

That led to researching the issue of climate change and water, which led to a 2002 study assessing the potential impacts of climate change under different scenarios. Since then, SPU hired a climate lead and established the Climate Resiliency Group, led by Paul Fleming.

In 2007, SPU undertook a second assessment using climate modeling output to assess impacts on water supply and is currently in the midst of a third study. In 2008, SPU extended its assessment efforts to its drainage, wastewater, and stormwater services.

“We view climate change as part of being a forward-looking utility,” says Fleming. “Looking at adaptation and mitigation is firmly embedded in our strategic plan.”

SPU has hired a meteorologist with a background in sea level rise who is helping the utility with enhanced weather forecasting and considering adaptation as it relates to sea level rise.

SPU also participates in the Water Utility Climate Alliance, a group of 10 large water utilities of which Fleming is past chair which is focused on improving the usefulness of climate science and enhancing decision-making under climate change.

Fleming coaches EPA’s Climate Ready Utility Working Group which led to the creation of CRWU. He is involved in numerous other national initiatives.

Fleming says he observes an increase in water utilities endeavoring to build capacity and people who can focus exclusively on the issue.

“We’re trying to build that capacity so we can understand our risks and embed responses to managing those risks into what we do,” he says. “We’re trying to mainstream it into the utility culture and practices.”

With the conventional wisdom being that climate change is going to lead to higher temperatures, SPU— which is a mixed snowpack and rainfall system—is looking to move from being snowpack-dominant in the future, particularly at the elevations where its watersheds are located.

“A top challenge is how do we navigate the changes in the water cycle and the movement from a hydrology that’s influenced significantly by the accumulation of snowpack to one that’s moving towards a hydrology that has less of a snowpack signal,” says Fleming.

“In our region, that means we’ll likely be moving from what we call a double hump in terms of flow in the rivers where we see an increase in the late fall and early winter as the rains return to this area and flows start to climb in rivers as temperatures start to drop,” he says. “Flows also drop because precipitation starts to appear as snowpack, so it gets locked up in the mountains. They start to climb again in the late winter and early spring as we start to see runoff

and snowmelt and we move toward a single hump flow.”

It will be a challenge to determine how to adjust the existing infrastructure and operating approaches to accommodate that departure on historic conditions, says Fleming.

A related challenge is determining if and when new investments are needed to ensure reliable service and at what scale such investments should be made.

Regarding treatment, a question for SPU going forward is what will be the threshold for moving into a regime where extreme rain events cause turbidity issues during the winter and, typically in the summer, increased air temperatures impact reservoirs.

“Our focus to date has been mostly on quantity and hydrology,” says Fleming. “We haven’t delved much into how algal blooms might become more frequent in the future.”

Another benefit to climate change planning is potential insurance premium reductions. SPU is self-insured, but Fleming points out that the insurance sector has been involved in climate change discussions to date.

He cites the report “Risky Business: the Economic Risks of Climate Change in the US” which can be found at www. riskybusiness.org.

“It frames climate change as a set of costs in the future and risks that taking action now can help avoid an order of magnitude greater risks and costs in the future,” says Fleming.

Fleming acknowledges some utilities may have a challenge using the phrase “climate change” to describe the assessment process. SPU has local support from citizens and elected officials, many of whom have come to expect it from a forward-thinking utility.

“It can be framed that you’re trying to save the world and there’s certainly an element of an ethical responsibility to do things that minimize global impacts,” he says. “Another element is that climate change is going to have impacts at the local level and if you are a provider of an essential service, you need to take into account how different disruptive forces can impede your ability to provide that essential service.”

The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) is a not-for-profit JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 33

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wholesale water utility comprised of seven member water and wastewater agencies that manage water resources on a regional basis, providing a unified voice on the Colorado River and helping ensure that southern Nevada’s needs are met efficiently. SNWA provides water to two million residents and 40 million annual visitors.

“The drought that has been gripping the Colorado River Basin over the last 15 years is the catalyst for us as a water manager to take stock on how climate change could potentially impact our daily operations and our ability to provide reliable quality water,” notes spokesperson Bronson Mack.

“There is no question in our minds that climate change is indeed occurring and we’re seeing the impacts of it,” he says.

“We need to be prepared to adapt and continue to meet the community’s needs.”

SNWA maintains a comprehensive water conservation program including a suite of incentives and actions that can be implemented to reduce water use.

Since 2002, the conservation program has resulted in a 30% water use reduction in the face of a population increase of 520,000 people.

“We’re not going to make the environment adapt to us, so how do we adapt to this environment to continue to meet water needs? For the past 15 years, as we have looked through our capital improvements program, our water resource planning efforts, our power purchases, all have been informed by the risk associated with climate change and our adaptation to it,” says Mack.

SNWA has been involved in the Water Utility Climate Alliance and EPA effort to make more informed decisions on its adaptation efforts.

Early on, SNWA identified integrating climate change data into its daily operations and anticipating different climate change regimes as one of the biggest challenges to ensuring it was sufficiently resilient.

SNWA developed an interdisciplinary climate change committee representing a cross-section of the entire organization to help educate employees.

“This committee was developed to identify some of the biggest risks associated with climate change for each individual department or individual of

“There is no question in our minds that climate change is indeed occurring.” the organization so that we could start to get a handle on the magnitude of the impact climate change could have on our individual work groups,” says Mack.

One of the first issues SNWA targeted for action was the potential that drought and climate change has to impact the Colorado River’s flows, which in turn impacts the levels of Lake Mead and Lake Powell.

Ninety percent of the total water supply is derived from Lake Mead and as lake levels decline, the surface of the lake gets closer to the existing intake infrastructure used to draw water from the lake and to the treatment plants.

“That brings forth a host of challenges, one of which being lake levels could drop below our existing intakes, basically making our intakes inoperable,” notes Mack. “Secondly, there are water-quality challenges associated with lowering lake levels as the better quality water is deeper within the lake and the lesser quality water is closer to the surface of the lake.”

Declining lake levels bring the lesser quality water closer to the intake system, so SNWA had to account for the potential water-quality impacts coming into the water treatment plant.

“We had to account for maintaining access to our water in Lake Mead if lake levels continue to decline,” says Mack.

Considering the vast majority of climate models agree that there will be increased temperatures, power supply is another consideration in the risk assessment, says Mack.

“As the lake declines and levels drop, that means more power is required to pump that water from lower elevations up to our treatment plants and therefore it takes more power to do that,” he adds.

People are expected to use more air conditioning, placing a greater demand on the power grid.

“There may be reliability issues

there for us as a water provider completely dependent upon power to move water into the valley,” he says. SNWA developed strategies to address those scenarios, such as the use of backup power supplies and generators.

SOUTH In south and south-central Florida, the Seminole Tribe of Florida provides drinking water and wastewater services to 2,000 people on four different reservations. The Hollywood Reservation is seven miles west of the Atlantic Ocean; the other three are inland.

The Seminole Tribe was approached

by EPA to participate in the agency’s CREAT program. In doing so throughout the early part of 2015, the Seminole Tribe focused risk assessment efforts on the Hollywood Reservation for increased demand on the aquifer from proposed and planned development for in the future, notes Gary Braganza, water-quality specialist.

“For the Brighton reservation, the impacts of wildfires on the water treatment plant were considered—specifically a threat to the generators that provided backup power for the treatment plant, he adds.

In partnership with EPA, Braganza began to identify potential adaptive measures the Seminole Tribe could take against potential climate change impacts.

Before engaging in the CREAT effort, “the threat of wildfires to the water treatment plant was not really considered,” says Braganza. “That brought the awareness that we do need to do something about that in case of drought.

Climate change can bring on increased drought, which can increase the fire risk and if so, we’re not ready for a wildfire that close to our treatment plant.”

To mitigate the effects of possible wildfire events at the Brighton Reservation, measures considered include fire management through clearing a tree line, a fire wall to replace a fence, and relocating generators to a new pad.

At the Hollywood Reservation, measures to address water supply demands include installing meters at isolation valves, water-efficient landscape and irrigation at the Tribe’s casino properties, “healthy homes” initiatives

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AUSTIN WATER

downscaled climate data and customized, facility-specific asset-threat pairings, including impacts not just related to water supply and demand but also extreme heat, adds Greene.

“A completed CREAT would also provide a useful database for scenarioplanning,” he says. “One concrete product of this pilot is a preliminary list of anticipated asset-threat pairings across all divisions of the utility.”

As the IWRP proceeds through its Systems Planning division, Austin Water may return to the CREAT to conduct the next steps of characterizing the assetthreat pairs, evaluating baseline conditions, and identifying adaptive measures, says Greene.

Equipment tunnels at the Ullrich water treatment plant in Austin

such as proper disposal down the drain and the importance of water conservation to the environment, an improved groundwater monitoring system, and community outreach programs.

“The Hollywood aquifers are still producing enough water to supply the reservation, so it’s not an immediate threat right now, but it’s something for us to consider in the future,” says Braganza.

Austin Water serves an estimated 950,000 people in Austin and surrounding areas in central Texas, providing drinking water, reclaimed water, and wastewater services. Stormwater is managed separately and is not combined with sewers and wastewater. Austin Water relies on surface water from the Colorado River of Texas as its supply, managed by the Lower Colorado River Authority.

Austin Water began a pilot effort in October 2014 to learn the features of EPA’s CREAT while at the same time initiating a multi-year effort to craft an Integrated Water Resource Plan (IWRP), part of which will incorporate planning for climate change. AWU staff members who are working on the plan also were participants in the CREAT pilot.

“Our goal with the CREAT pilot was not to conduct a complete risk and resiliency assessment and plan, but rather to learn enough about the tool to understand how it might be used to inform—or as part of—the larger IWRP effort,” notes David Greene, an engineer in Austin’s Environmental and Regulatory Services Division.

Through the course of the pilot program, Austin Water confirmed that it can adapt the CREAT tool to include

MIDAMERICA In mid-America, the Hillsboro, KS, water utility decided a year ago to tackle the issue of climate change on behalf of its population of 3,000 using EPA’s CREAT tool.

“Drought is an issue in the middle of the United States and when we were nominated to get into this program, that was the key thing going on,” notes Larry Paine, city administrator.

Significant rainfall hit the area during the past summer, but it’s still the drought episodes driving the city’s climate planning efforts.

Part of the challenge for Hillsboro entering into the study was how it was presented.

“Kansas is a very conservative area, so in terms of dealing with this process, we were not looking at it as a way of saying global warming is an issue,” says Paine. “But we know that the weather patterns we’re dealing with right now are cyclical. We’ve had periods of a lot of rain and periods of no rain, so what we are looking at is when we’re in a low rainfall cycle, how do we deal with that?”

Hillsboro pumps water from a nearby Army Corps of Engineers lake.

“There are two cities near that reservoir that draw water from that same source, so when we have low rain, we don’t have the usual amount of water in the reservoir and the concentration of contaminants that show up in the lake water increase because you don’t have nearly as much water flushing the reservoir,” says Paine.

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adaptive measures that could help his wastewater collection and treatment facility be more secure in dealing with any potential climate-related issues.

Faribault Public Works serves a population of 23,000, treating all of the municipal and industrial wastewater flow within the city of Faribault—an average of 3.5–4 million gallons a day.

With the wastewater treatment facility being the focus of the project, Block looked at ways of developing alternatives such as streambank stabilization, a dike, or levy berm to protect the facility against flooding consequences going forward.

“Some of the other measures potentially could be infrastructure areas where we have the potential of aging systems getting infiltration from storm events,” adds Block.

Some concepts that arose from the CREAT project that Block hadn’t previously considered included broader scope, long-term issues such as watershed planning and the development of green infrastructure.

“These are things I don’t have a tangible experience with every day, so I really didn’t give them much thought, but in the long run in a 20- to 30-year plan, those things have potential down the road,” says Block. “Just like stormwater wasn’t a big issue a few years ago and now it is. It opened my eyes to things I didn’t think about before.”

As with any improvements, financing is a concern.

“What spurred out of this is a developing an analysis of looking at any potential funding from the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Natural Resources, or flood mitigation funding,” says Block. “We’re still in the exploratory stages of trying to figure out what we’re going to do going forward.”

NORTHEAST In the Northeast, United Water New Jersey is a water utility servicing 850,000 people through the Haworth Water Treatment Plant in New Jersey. The utility has four reservoirs in the Hackensack River Basin—three in New Jersey which serve as the primary sources and one in Rockland County, NY, with a regulated flow.

The driving factor for putting together a climate change plan—begun

UNITED WATER

“Plus we have blue green algae and zebra mussel impact that affects the way we treat water for our customers, so we have to look down the calendar about how to address that.”

Paine says the process confirmed to him that his municipality was on the right track in terms of water treatment and water planning.

From a stormwater point of view, the process shed light on what the town needs to do in terms of stormwater disposal, he says.

“When it does rain, it rains a lot, so when the water comes, it comes fast and it goes away fast,” Paine notes. “After a while, it doesn’t. We have clay-like soil type, so the water absorption has an impact depending on the length of the rain events. How we are treating that stormwater that eventually gets into the reservoir affects the way our water plant runs on a day-to-day basis and some of the things we do day in and day out change because of the change of the water quality.”

The town’s largest area of concern is the water treatment plant. “We had some plant upgrades about 10 to 15 years ago that changed the method in which we treat water because of the blue green algae,” says Paine. “When you hit it with chlorine, the blue green algae cells come apart and the algal toxins inside those cells become a health problem for our customers if we’re not doing the water treatment properly.

“Part of what we’re looking at is how we go through asset management and do plant maintenance and upgrades to meet the requirements for removing algal toxins. We’re probably doing a whole lot more in terms of the pre-treatment treatment process so we can make sure the water we give to the customers is good. In addition, we also are a provider to another small town near Hillsboro— Peabody—so we’ve got the added requirement to make sure their water quality is good, too.”

The region of Faribault, MN, has experienced a great deal of flooding throughout recent years, including a major flood in 2010, followed by a smaller one in 2014.

At that point, Travis Block, the city’s public works director, chose to work with EPA on the CREAT program to identify

in November 2014 and completed in May 2015—was a “combination of general climate change and EPA providing us with the opportunity to work with the agency, particularly using their CREAT tool,” says Steve Goudsmith, director of communications for United Water in New Jersey.

“It helped us to categorize things in a more succinct way,” adds Goudsmith. “It brought some internal teams together to really think about the critical issues and brought to light questions we need answered about how we’re going to respond to certain climate situations, particularly dry conditions and drought.”

While the company operates a wastewater utility, the focus was on its water utility.

The summer of 2015 “really underscored the need to take a more critical look at water supply issues and subsequently treatment issues, but particularly water supply,” says Goudsmith.

In mid-September, Goudsmith noted that northern New Jersey had experienced one of the driest Augusts in the last 100 years. Reservoir levels were only at 45% capacity as of midSeptember before the area got some rain, bringing it closer to 50%, which is significantly lower than what utility managers wanted it to be at that time of year.

“This is potentially a trend we’re going to see over time,” says Goudsmith.

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One of the four reservoirs servicing the Haworth Treatment Plant “It’s something that we not only need to monitor but we need to be ready for. In terms of supply, that may mean looking for additional sources and it may mean that we may have to institute voluntary and even mandatory restrictions at times.”

Almost all of the supply comes from surface water “and because of that, we are very dependent on rainfall,” says Goudsmith. “We have to fill our New Jersey reservoirs five times over every year to meet demand. So if we get continued growth in the area and we have more service connections, then that could put additional strain on our system as well as dry and drought conditions.”

The team assembled to create the utility’s climate change plan included professionals from critical aspects of United Water New Jersey operations, including water supply professionals, water-quality professionals and distribution professionals.

The time and financial resources dedicated to the effort “never really was a concern for us,” says Goudsmith. “We recognized these are conditions that probably are not single phenomenon and will continue to happen. Climate change is real. We need to respond to it.

We need to have an organized team to understand it and to figure out what we need to do.”

Capital Region Water (CRW) provides services to 60,000 residential and

commercial drinking water connections and 130,000 wastewater connections in Harrisburg, PA, and neighboring communities.

CRW’s primary drinking water source is the DeHart Reservoir, a “pristine” six billion gallon reservoir located 25 miles north of Harrisburg, fed by Clarks Creek, notes CRW CEO Shannon Williams.

The Susquehanna River is a secondary water source that can be used when additional water supply is needed. CRW’s water treatment plant, the Dr. Robert E. Young Water Services Center, is rated at 20 million gallons per day (MGD), but usually sees a demand of 8 MGD. CRW also operates a wastewater system comprised of both separate sanitary and storm sewer facilities and a combined sewer system, which includes several pump stations and treats about 20 MGD of wastewater from Harrisburg and other neighboring municipalities at its advanced wastewater treatment facility (AWTF).

Capital Region Water was one of 23 utilities nationwide selected by EPA to receive technical assistance using its CREAT tool to better understand the vulnerability of its drinking water and wastewater infrastructure and operations.

“The assessment brought together individuals from various departments within CRW and EPA staff to think critically about potential climate impacts, priority assets, and possible adaptation options,” notes Williams.

Work commenced in December 2014 and the initial assessment was completed in June 2015. CRW is committed to subsequent assessments in 2016 and 2017.

Flooding from intense precipitation and rising river levels is of concern to CRW managers. Harrisburg has previously been affected by severe storm events, including Hurricane Agnes in 1972, Tropical Storm Lee in 2011, and river flooding from snowmelt compounded with increased spring precipitation.

During Hurricane Agnes, river levels reached 36 feet, causing significant inundation at the AWTF. “During Tropical Storm Lee, water rose onto the AWTF property, and some access roads were flooded,” says Tanya

Dierolf, sustainability manager. “The AWTF, wastewater pumping stations, the DeHart Reservoir dam and raw water intake, as well as the alternate raw water intake facility on the Susquehanna River, are at risk from damage due to flooding.”

Also considered in the assessment was the threat of low water levels under a drought scenario.

“CRW is concerned that such extreme events would become more frequent under a changing climate,” adds Dierolf.

CRW managers considered the potential consequences to their drinking water and wastewater utility infrastructure and operations from extreme flooding and drought events.

“To assess each of these potential threats, CRW considered how potential adaptive measures would help lower consequences,” says Dierolf.

Several adaptive measures were considered.

For the wastewater pumping stations, that includes back-up power, a flood risk management plan, elevating electrical components, replacing pumps with submersibles, backflow prevention, infiltration reduction, sewage separation, and green infrastructure.

For the AWTF, measures under consideration include increased capacity, green infrastructure at the facility and in the community, combined sewer overflow strategies, and infiltration reduction.

For the DeHart Reservoir, measures considered include an improved drought contingency plan, leakage reduction, demand management and reduced conservation release with regulatory flexibility.

In working on the climate change plan, CRW has incurred no costs to date with the exception of staff time, says Williams. A team was assembled at CRW to work on it.

“The costs will be associated with implementation of adaptation measures and how these are integrated into larger organizational planning,” she says. “It includes leadership, engineering, sustainability, and operations staff.”

In addressing climate change issues, Manchester Department of Public Works focused on its wastewater treatment plant, which services about 5,000 residents.

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“We know that sea level rise is coming, we know that storm surge is coming, and the storms are getting more intense, so our most vulnerable facility was the one that sits literally on the edge of the ocean—the headworks building is about two feet below sea level,” says Murray In going through the CREAT model in early 2015, the utility’s managers determined that when the region encounters a situation in which there is a king tide event with a storm surge and with sea level rise, “in about 20 years, we’re going to have all of our equipment at the plant under water,” says Murray.

“That made us sit up and say ‘OK, we’re going to be making continuous investments in that plant, so how do we do it and do it smart so we are protecting our facility and then in 2035, what does that mean? How do we continue to process wastewater efficiently in the town?”

That may mean using that particular plant as nothing more than a major pumping station and relocate the wastewater treatment facility somewhere else, says Murray.

“It was a sobering exercise, but an important one because as we make investments, we want to do it prudently and for the long term, not just for today,” she adds.

In going through the CREAT tool, “the one factor that hit us right between the eyes is how quickly we are facing this,” says Murray. “The year 2035 is in our planning realm so we need to be facing it. That was kind of a shocker.”

Another surprise that manifested itself in the process is the realization “how everything that is in that facility that’s critical—all of the pumps and the mechanics that make the plant work— are on the lowest floor on the lowest elevation, so they will be hit first,” says Murray. “You can live without your administrative offices, but not without your critical systems that make everything work.”

The economics of spending the time to do climate change planning is rooted in “pay now or pay lots more later,” notes Murray. “It’s one of those types of investments like if you had a loose shingle on

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your roof, you could fix that one shingle or you could ignore it and then all of a sudden, you’re going to be replacing the whole underlay part of the roof and potentially some rafters and you could have some leaks downstairs. Or you can do some preventative things now that will save you in the long term.”

Planning for climate change entails examining the life cycle costs and a cost-benefit analysis, says Murray, adding that “in some cases, you’re going to make these investments anyway—you’re just going to make them smarter.”

The driving factor for addressing climate change through a formal plan was a rain event in October 2014 during which the area received seven inches of rain in less than 24 hours, resulting in flooding.

“This past winter woke a lot of us up,” says Murray. “Is this our new normal?

And then we had the opportunity to participate in the CREAT endeavor. Everybody can laugh about climate change, but our weather is changing so we need to get ready and make smart decisions.”

WHAT OF THOSE UTILITIES THAT DO NOT HAVE A CLIMATEREADY PROGRAM? “EPA encourages all sized water sector utilities to become more climate-ready by assisting them to better understand their climate impacts and in assessing climate risk, resulting in the identification and implementation of climate ready adaptive measures,” says EPA’s Daguillard. “Because of the voluntary nature of EPA’s CRWU initiative, utilities can use our highly-flexible climate ready tools at their own pace and discretion.”

EPA’s CREAT provides libraries of drinking water and wastewater utility assets, such as water resources, treatment plants, and pump stations that could be impacted by climate change and potential climate change-related threats, such as flooding, drought, and water quality, and adaptive measures that can be implemented to reduce their impacts.

The tool guides users through identifying threats based on regional differences in climate change projections and designing adaptation plans based on the types of threats being considered.

Following assessment, CREAT provides a series of risk reduction and cost reports enabling the user to evaluate

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annual total precipitation, annual average temperature, precipitation intensity for the 100-year storm, number of days per year with temperatures above 100ºF, and sea-level rise for coastal locations.

Within specific grid cells on the map, users will find tables that provide changes in annual temperature and precipitation in two time periods (2035 and 2060) for three climate model projections: hotter and drier conditions, warmer and wetter conditions, and cen-

tral conditions, representing the middle of the model distribution.

A third table provides two projections for 100-year storm intensity, in the same two time periods, from low (non-stormy) and high (stormy) changes in storm intensity.

Coastal grid cells display the range of potential sea-level rise by 2060.

The Storm Surge Inundation and Hurricane Strike Frequency Map illustrates current worst-case coastal storm

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various adaptation options as part of long-term planning.

For utilities to understand their potential future climate projections, they can use tools such as EPA’s CRWU Adaptation Strategies Guide.

“Once there is a basic understanding of climate impacts, utility owners and operators should use EPA’s CRWU Workshop Planner and CREAT to address and assess climate impact, as well as identify and implement adaptive measures,” says Daguillard. Those measures include addressing such extreme weather events as flooding, drought, reduced snowpack, sea level rise, and wildfires.

EPA offers all of its climate ready tools for free on its website. The tools are designed for water utilities with varying degrees of familiarity—from novice to expert—with climate science.

The Adaptation Strategies Guide is a tool for utilities that are beginning to consider climate change. It is designed to provide easy-to-understand climate science and translate how climate change effects could potentially impact specific water utility assets and operations.

It provides basic information on climate change impacts, organized by US region; information on specific climate change-related impacts; adaptation options for each impact; and sustainability briefs on green infrastructure, energy management, and water demand management.

The Extreme Event Workshop Planner helps utilities prepare for extreme events by providing materials needed to plan, facilitate, and conduct an adaptation planning workshop in their community.

Workshops create a forum to openly discuss extreme event adaptation while bringing utility and community partners together, points out Daguillard.

The Scenario-Based Projected Changes Map is designed to provide easily accessible scenarios of projected climate changes for the location of interest. Users can get a glimpse of what their climate future may look like, including

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surge scenarios, FEMA flood maps for coastal counties, and the historical hurricane strike frequency for the location of interest.

The information is derived from Sea, Lake, and Overland Surge from Hurricanes (SLOSH) models by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; 100 and 500 year flood plains from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and hurricane strike dataset from the National Hurricane Center.

The searchable Climate Ready Water Utilities Toolbox contains reports, articles, and other publications; information about grant programs that could support climate-related actions by utilities and municipalities; current activities; upcoming seminars, workshops, and training sessions; models and tools; and climate response materials focusing on mitigation and adaptive strategies.

The toolbox can be searched by geographic region, water utility type and size, water resources, climate change impact, and climate change response strategies.

EPA’s CRWU initiative has focused recent efforts on outreach to utilities through training and partnership opportunities to establish a community of utilities seeking to become “climate ready,” says Daguillard.

“These efforts facilitate adoption of EPA tools and resources and help to cultivate a peer-to-peer network by connecting utilities with similar concerns and interests,” he adds.

“These connections, through time, will build a community of utilities enhancing their resilience to climate change.”

EPA’s CRWU is building tools to foster sharing of infor-

w Ne

st! ca b We

mation through EPA’s GeoPlatform and encouraging those working with CREAT and other tools to share their experiences through videos on EPA’s YouTube site and webinars presented with EPA staff, says Daguillard.

Braganza says the CREAT tool “has come a long way” from its initial design.

“At first it was a little cumbersome to use,” he says. “But the new version is very user- friendly. I would encourage other utilities to start now to at least start to think about the possibilities of how climate change could affect them.

“If they are a utility that’s close to the ocean, then they need to take steps as far as sea level rise or maybe salt water intrusion into the aquifer,” he adds. “If they are in a floodprone zone, they’re more susceptible to flooding, or if they’re in a hurricane-prone zone, they might want to take steps to lessen the effects of that. The tool is very flexible. It allows you to put in whatever scenario, whatever threat that you want to define in it.”

Fleming advises utilities that haven’t started the process to network with neighboring utilities.

“If there’s a shared interest, but nothing is happening, then jointly they could go to their local university to see if there is anybody there looking at the issue that would be interested in collaboration,” he says.

In addition to using EPA’s CREAT for self-diagnostics and self-assessments, another resource is the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which has climate Fo Reg res is ter ter Un tod ive ay rsi at ty. ne t!

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research centers nationwide.

A number of associations also have educational efforts, such as the American Water Works Association, the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, the American Society of Civil Engineers, the Water Utility Climate Alliance, and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

Fleming also advises designating someone to take responsibility for the initiative.

“We don’t have an adaptation plan,” he says. “We’ve embedded climate change into our water system plan. That’s another decision to be made: to what degree do you want to have something separate versus embedded.”

Block’s advice to any utility deciding to create a climateready plan is to start small and pick out one aspect. For his area, the focus is on wastewater.

“You can’t try to solve the whole thing in a day because these are complex situations we’re looking at,” he points out.

“You’re not going to get this stuff built in a day, either. As long as you’re progressing, it’s fine. It’s been a year now and we got some options out of it. The next phase is how we’re going to implement things. You have to sequentially work your way through it.”

Goudsmith advises other utilities that no matter how small they are, they need to be prepared for extreme weather events, be they significant floods, droughts, or just changing climate conditions.

“We all need to be aware of what that impact could

possibly be on our utilities and our number one priority is to make sure we are continuing with reliable service,” he says.

“You can’t do that if you’re not prepared. We have enjoyed collaborating with the EPA. We find that the agency is a good source of information and I would further encourage other utilities to use the CREAT tool and to partner with the agency.”

Paine says his advice to other water utility managers in doing climate change plans is to understand that in order to get the best results, the process requires a time investment.

“This is the most important lesson I got out of it,” he says.

“This isn’t just a matter of filling out a few blocks on the software the EPA provides. It’s going to take some time and effort in order to work through the process.”

It also takes a team effort, he says, adding that beyond the water department, the effort requires assistance from the policy makers and the administrative staff.

“It’s not simple and it’s not a cookie cutter approach where if you go through this, you know what to do because you don’t,” says Paine. ‘What we’ve learned is there’s an awful lot of brain work that has to go through this is trying to figure out if we do this, then what will be doing? If we do that, then what will we be doing? It’s not for the faint-hearted. You need to believe you’re going to get some value out of this before you go through it. It’s work with a capital W-O-R-K.” WE Carol Brzozowski specializes in topics related to water resource management and technology.

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I-CON

Water Sustainability in Prisons While prisoners are a community’s “out of sight, out of mind” population, taxpayers are footing the bill for those who are incarcerated.

By Carol Brzozowski

T

he average cost of confinement across the country is approaching $30,000 a year for each prisoner, says Tommy Norris, who operates www.greenprisons.org. The most recent US Department of Justice prison population count places it at 2.1 million.

“That makes prison an extremely expensive operation for the taxpayer short-term and long-term, and virtually everything you have in a small city you have in a prison—from the food service to the laundry to the fire department—and nearly all of those functions consume utilities, including water,” notes Norris.

While one may assume that an inmate wouldn’t have cause to use any more water than the person who is not incarcerated, statistics reveal otherwise: the average person uses between 80–100

gallons of water per day and prisoners use 120–149 gallons per day. The reason: because they can.

In a prison, there is little that an inmate can control, points out Shawn Bush, president and CEO of I-CON Systems, which manufactures technology Norris regards as the “gold standard” in prison water efficiency.

“They are told when to eat, where to go, when to sleep, and when the lights can go on and off, but they can always control their button on their toilet,” says Bush.

“We have people locked up in prison for making some bad decisions, and just because they’re locked up doesn’t mean they stop making bad decisions,” notes Norris. “Historically, one of the things they’ve been able to control in those cells that have plumbing fixtures is the water. They jam stuff down the

toilets, flood the toilets, and flood the range, creating dangerous situations of water overflowing off of the fourth or fifth tier. They want to mess with the staff. They want to demonstrate their angst.”

Inmates may or may not have trash cans, but nonetheless they’ll take food waste or other items and use the toilet as a trash can because they don’t want to have to smell it or deal with it, adds Bush.

“If inmates want to get out of their cell, they’ll clog their toilet and flush it multiple times and they’ll flood their cell to try to get out of their cell,” says Bush.

“It’s one way they get to go into the recreational area or move somewhere while someone has to clean their cell out.”

Inmates also will use toilets to flush contraband away during a search.

In addition to water waste, excess

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flushing also leads to rapid wear and tear on the fixtures and increased maintenance and replacement costs.

There is a growing awareness among correctional facility administrators that is dovetailing with society in general about how valuable a commodity water is and how important it is to control, says Norris.

Six years ago, the American Correctional Association began to take a serious look at the importance of sustainability in the operation of correctional facilities, says Norris. He then started www.greenprisons.org, a nonprofit organization providing training, technical assistance, and information on sustainable practices and products for the correctional community.

Norris is a veteran prison administrator whose career spans work with the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the National Institute of Corrections, various state correctional systems, undergraduate instruction, and chairman of the American Correctional Association’s Clean and Green committee.

Norris considers three factors in correctional facility initiatives. One is that it has to make financial sense.

“Ideally, it has to generate money but at the very least, it has to save significant dollars to make it worthwhile,” he says.

His second consideration: whether it will provide opportunities for offenders to learn new skills through training programs that will lead to job opportunities when they are released from prison.

Environmental impact is a third consideration. “The facility administrator is part of a community and has a vested interest in being seen positively by the community,” says Norris. “So when they speak with various community groups, they can talk about the tons of solid waste they’ve diverted from the landfill or their water conservation efforts.”

Depending on the facility’s location, water can rival energy in utility costs, points out Norris. In his home state of Kentucky, electricity is inexpensive compared to water, “which can get pretty pricey,” he adds.

“Add on the wastewater charges that typically are a factor of four on the back end of that,” says Norris. “Administra-

tors are becoming more aware of water conservation in terms of the amount of water they use.”

Sustainability in prisons “checks a lot of the boxes that relate to revenue and financial solvency,” points out Norris. “Nobody is giving us any extra money to run these facilities, many of which are 40 to 100 or more years old and some of the plumbing in them seems like it’s almost that old. Looking for strategies to operate more efficiently is always important.”

Norris works with companies such as I-CON Systems and EasyWater, which uses salt-free water conditioning to help extend equipment life.

I-CON Systems, Inc. in Oviedo, FL, was founded in 1994 by a core group of individuals previously employed at a small local corporation which developed and manufactured plumbing systems using infrared technology for local major theme parks and Orlando area customers.

Company managers focused on targeting the untouched retrofit market of older jails and prisons by developing technology that would help in saving costs on water, maintenance, and repair.

“Local people in the correctional industry started telling me about their problems with water because I was doing water control with the commercial side,” notes Bush. “I thought if one facility was having these kinds of problems, a lot of facilities had it.”

I-CON Systems provides vandalresistant systems that remove an inmate’s ability to abuse the plumbing systems.

The systems are designed to conserve water, conserve costs, and increase security.

Products offered include valves for flush, lavoratory, shower, and urinals for new installations and retrofits. The company offers non-communicating and communicating controls and a computer system network operation for main control of pods and units by touchscreen technology allowing a correctional officer to control a single cell or entire pod in seconds for security purposes and monitor water consumption in real time.

It is a 24-volt system. Battery operated units are available. The company offers a stainless steel series of fixtures.

I-CON Systems installs a small

controller akin to a microprocessor in the chase area behind the cell where the inmates can’t get to it. The controller tracks how often someone is flushing the toilet. The technology is used to control how often the toilet can be flushed through the flush valve. The microprocessor locks the system out for a specified amount of time for an inmate or particular group of inmates.

I-CON’s flush valve is designed to use half of the water of other flush valves, says Bush.

“Normally, we’ll flush 3.5 gallons or 1.6 gallons every flush,” he says. “The I-CON technology flushes 1.6 gallons on 3.5-gallon toilets in prisons or can flush 1 gallon on a 1.6-gallon fixture.

So every time an inmate flushes, the technology controls how often they flush and flushes half the amount of water. Those two factors will get about a 70% savings based on not having this technology installed.”

The microprocessor can act like a control on a standalone basis. The microprocessors and controllers can be looped together. “The touch screen would be able to see the entire facility or the pod and then correctional officers can control each one of those cells as individuals or as a group,” says Bush.

“If the correctional officers were going to do a search because they thought there was contraband in there, they could push one button on a touch screen. All of the toilets could go on a lock-out mode where somebody can’t flush the toilet and then they could do their search so the contraband can’t be flushed away,” he adds.

When doing a search application, the screen enables the user to see while an inmate is pushing the button as they throw contraband in the toilet that the action is taking place in a particular cell.

Systems like I-CON allow the correctional staff to regulate an inmate’s access to water and thus quash their ability to flush items down the toilet that are not meant to be flushed, says Norris.

It takes the control of water out of the hands of prisoners and puts it squarely with correctional staff members.

“If they misuse it, you can cut it off.

With the I-CON System, if there are one or two bad actors who are trying to JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 43

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I-CON

Prison staff is trained in flood their cell, you simply I-CON’s water moniits use. I-CON Systems proreduce their access to water toring technology vides training each quarter to two flushes an hour and helps control prison or will send trainers to the 30 seconds of washing for water use in a way site if there are a number hands time and that’s it. The that is inconspicuous of people needing training, rest of the guys on the range to prison inmates. says Bush. who are acting responsibly While the technology can still have access to it as is often installed by outside contracthey need it, but it eliminates the ability tors, maintaining it is often done by the for an offender to act out by using water inmates, says Bush. as a weapon,” says Norris.

“Not only is the maintenance staff The system is designed in such a fashion that the officer on the range who there when we do a training, but more often than not, the inmate trustees are is not a plumber or otherwise technithere as well, because they are the ones cally skilled can control it from his or out there in the trenches helping to her desk at such hours as 3 a.m. without having to call a maintenance foreman in, troubleshoot something or report back says Norris, adding that it saves on costs. to the maintenance managers what they’re seeing and are replacing and The touch screen is designed to maintaining those parts.” be user-friendly, says Bush. It features The I-CON Systems technology a graphical layout of the facility’s floor offers a two- to five-year payback. plan. A menu allows the user to pull up “This kind of technology is not a picture of a particular cell and offers everywhere in corrections, but it is the option of putting it on a lockdown certainly growing,” says Norris. “Institumode—flushing it, doing maintenance, tions where I know it has been installed or troubleshooting it.

swear by it. They appreciate the savings, but beyond that, it’s one more level of control they’ve got to make the institution safer for the staff and for the inmates.”

Another sustainability measure has had unintended consequences of water waste.

Before any effluent goes out into the sewage treatment system—be it operated by the facility or a municipality—it is ground up in sewage grinders that make it more biodegradable and thus keep it out of the landfill, saving landfill space and hauling expenses. Norris points out that each inmate produces between 1 and 1.5 pounds of solid food waste a day.

While Norris says there’s a value in the food waste not going to the landfill, he adds that the processing of grinding up the waste that goes into the wastewater treatment system utilizes a great deal of water.

“So it’s ‘green’, but the realities are the water bills they’re running up is almost counterproductive, so correctional

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systems are looking at either traditional composting, windrow composting, or in-vessel composters that will dispose of all of the solid food waste without using any water,” he says.

Norris says some prison systems are more aware of the need for water conservation than others.

“When you have a physical plant that’s 80 to 100 years old and you’ve got boilers that have been patched and retrofitted and steam lines that have been underground for 80 years and leak like sieves, it can be very difficult to get money from legislators for correctional projects of any kind, but particularly for those,” says Norris. “The thinking is it’s only another 10% on the water bill.

We’ll just let that slide and do something else. The cost of maintaining these old structures and converting the infrastructure to more modern energy- and resource-saving strategies can be very challenging.”

Many correctional systems are working diligently to have an impact on water conservation, says Norris.

I-CON Systems’ technology is now in more than 400 correctional facilities in the US, Canada, and some locations outside of North America. One installation is at FCI Coleman Low, the

country’s largest federal facility, which is located in Florida.

Norris offers as a case in point the Indiana Department of Correction’s facility retrofits. “They are looking at all of the factors surrounding water costs because it is growing exponentially for them and their maintenance director is very proactive in trying to find ways that will impact the cost of his operations.”

The Marion County Detention

Center, a 300-bed jail in south central Kentucky, recently audited its entire operation as it approached 25 years. Much of the infrastructure was starting to break down, including a new boiler that was “leaking like a sieve,” notes Norris.

“When the consultant finished looking at the snapshot of the facility, unlike most facilities where energy is a big ticket item, in fact, it was water,” says Norris. The facility switched to a tankless water heater and is now saving more

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I-CON

than 30% on the water bill now, which produces similar savings on the wastewater bill, he adds.

In states where water conservation is on a crisis level and even farmers growing food are making water sacrifices, such as California, cognizance of the importance of the prison sector is more pronounced.

“A lot of systems, particularly those in California, have gone away from watering gardens,” he says. “They’ve become very creative in the use of repurposing water in a lot of ways. The unfortunate part is they haven’t had much rain to repurpose.”

California is building a lot of new prisons and is incorporating state-of-the-art watersaving technologies in them, says Norris.

In addition to I-CON Systems’ technology, other water saving measures are being touted for the prison system, though not widely adopted as of yet. As stated in the Greening

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Corrections Technology Guidebook, prepared I-CON Nexus Controller for the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, waterless urinals is one option.

Case in point: Florida’s 900-bed Alachua County Jail’s water conservation program included the replacement of existing 3.5-gallons-per-flush (gpf) pneumatically controlled toilets with new controlled 1.6-gpf toilets containing security lock-out controls, the installation of waterless urinals, and the replacement of lavatory and shower controls and valves throughout the facility with tamper-resistant, automaticshutoff timer controls. The jail achieves an overall 62% reduction in water use from 36 million gallons per year to approximately 17 million gallons per year.

Rainwater catchment is another option. E. W. Bob Boulware, P.E., president of Design-Aire Engineering in Indianapolis, IN, points out three reasons to utilize rainwater harvesting.

“One is that you don’t have enough water and there’s too long of a period between rainfalls, so it acts as a bank account for water,” he says.

The second is poor water quality, which is getting to be a bigger issue, he adds.

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“When the consultant finished looking at the snapshot of the facility, unlike most facilities where energy is a big ticket item, in fact, it was water.”

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The third is stormwater management. He cites downtown New York City, which collects the first inch of rain on site, as an example of how it’s done. “They’ll reserve a part of their rainwater collection tank for that first inch of rain and then there’s a metered opening that drips that water someplace— typically watering landscape or metering it into the storm system to reduce that first influx of water that the storm will impart on the sewage system,” he says.

“It reduces combined sewer overflows when a storm comes in, overflows the sewage treatment plant and then all of a sudden sewage is going down rivers and streams, making it a polluted water source. Downstream somebody is going to be trying to get water out for their city water.”

Rainwater catchment is effective in areas where drought and water shortages are common, points out Boulware.

A stormwater pipe system can be undersized after paving a large area, says Boulware. Measures that can be taken include controlling the site grade to water area vegetation, create pervious parking areas and utilize underground cisterns for later water use. LEED points can be acquired through such practices.

Correctional facilities not only can be proving grounds for new water conservation technologies, but in many ways, they are a microcosm of what it takes to run a city and as part of a community. “It’s really important for a lot of reasons—not the least of which is efficiency—that they be run responsibly,” says Norris.

Correctional facility management can provide teaching moments to the community at large, he adds.

“You might have some sort of calamity where maybe a water main gets ruptured,” says Norris. “You’ve got 2,000 guys and you can’t let them sit in their cells and dehydrate and not be able to go to the bathroom, so it creates all of these social and security issues about trucking in bottled water and bringing in porta-potties, all of which can be very challenging as corrections finds ways to deal with emergencies,” says Norris.

As such, those lessons are exportable to other sectors in society, he adds.

Although prisons are the target market, Bush points out that the I-CON System technology can be converted to other industrial and commercial settings to track and analyze data within a facility, as well as troubleshoot problems.

I-CON System’s Ed Hull, customer service manager, points out that many states are interested in conserving water—some of them more critically than others because of drought situations.

“Even if you’re not facing that kind of situation, you need to be preparing for the future and start conserving the water now,” he says. WE Carol Brzozowski specializes in topics related to water resource management and technology.

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PROJECT PROFILE

WITH A BUSTLING POPULATION nearing 10,000, the small but fast-growing community of Rapid Valley, SD, has become an attractive alternative to bigger city living. Its low crime rate, affordable land, and impressive views of the Black Hills create the perfect backdrop for the steadily increasing collection of homes and businesses being built there.

Rapid Valley’s need for an abundant source of safe water to ensure its long-term growth and vitality has been clear from the start. Established in 1966, Rapid Valley Sanitary District (RVSD) was formed to provide water and sewer service to the small rural community developing approximately 10 miles east of Rapid City. For many years, RVSD purchased water from the City of Rapid City. Later, it became more self-sufficient in the production of water.

GLASSFUSEDTOSTEEL SEALS THE DEAL Part of the move toward self-sufficiency was the construction of a 166,000-gallon steel water tank in the 1960s. In 2000, after decades of growth, RVSD installed another tank, a 256,000-gallon Aquastore glass-fused-to-steel tank from Engineering America.

That tank, due to its low-maintenance, high durability porcelain enamel (glass-fused-to-steel) coating, has performed so well over the past 14 years that it became the obvious choice when it was time to replace the aging 1960s tank in 2014.

“We needed to accommodate the area’s growth and have enough water in storage for emergency and fire protection,” says Rusty Schmidt, RVSD general manager. “Our older epoxy coated tank was experiencing structural issues and corrosion problems. Our newer Aquastore tank was showing no signs of wear on its exterior or interior coating even at

RAPID VALLEY SANITARY DISTRICT

The Perfect Pair: Two Glass-Fused-To-Steel Tanks Ease the Pressure on Small-Town Growth

Glass-fused-to-steel tanks of Rapid Valley, SD

14 years old. So we decided to install a second tank just like it.”

Ted Schulz, operations manager at AE2S, the engineering firm that designed the tank, concurred, saying, “The need for additional storage was apparent as the district grew. The installation of the second Aquastore tank was part of a two-prong approach to provide more storage and replace the older tank, which was failing due to corrosion of the painted steel exterior and notable ice damage inside the tank. Several leaks had been patched over the last few years, and the steel walls were very damaged due to ice problems. We wanted to get it resolved before the area’s summer peak season.”

COSTEFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVE TO EPOXY COATINGS The new glass-fused-to-steel tank is 36 feet tall and 33 feet in diameter. The 257,869-gallon tank was built on a hill next to the other Aquastore tank and is exposed to the elements. The wind

is quite strong at times so the district needed a tank that wouldn’t be susceptible to damage from blowing debris.

The factory-applied silica glass coating on Aquastore tanks forms a hard, inert barrier for both the interior and exterior tank surfaces guarding against weather conditions and corrosion. Glass fused to steel is impermeable to liquids and vapors, and controls undercutting caused by corrosion, which offers excellent impact and abrasion resistance.

“We did a cost comparison between a welded-and-painted tank and the Aquastore glass-fused-to-steel tank,” says Schmidt. “It was soon evident that the Aquastore tank provided a long-term value that exceeded any epoxy tank.

You can recoup your initial capital costs quickly just saving maintenance costs.”

Schmidt added that epoxy coatings are expensive, time-consuming to paint and probably need repainting every 15 years over a 75-year lifespan, but remarked that in contrast, the Aquastore tank provides a solid, virtually

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maintenance-free exterior that doesn’t ever need to be repainted. “Unlike an epoxy coating, the Aquastore glassfused-to-steel coating is inert and stable, does not sacrifice itself, fade, chalk, or degrade—a bonus when your water tanks are part of the landscape in such a picturesque location.”

ACCOMMODATING A VARIED TERRAIN Another element that featured prominently in RVSD’s decision to go with the Aquastore tank was the district’s terrain.

“The drain in this part of the valley is through undulating hills,” says Schulz. “The tank is at the top of the hill providing service and pressure to several hundred homes. The area around it now is pasture, but the community is growing quickly. Each year, 20 to 40 houses are added that will need to be served by the

inar! b e W New

district. This storage tank is located in the high-pressure zone and includes a booster station that pumps to this level.”

Schmidt elaborates: “Many systems have multiple pressure zones depending on the terrain and different tank elevations. When systems expand and grow, you may need to build booster stations to pump water to the higher elevations.

This can go the other direction as well.

If the system expands to lower elevations, you may need pressure-reducing valves to reduce the water pressure as it goes to these lower developments. The new tanks were built at a high elevation to accommodate the area’s continuing development and need for storage, emergency, and fire flow capacity to the higher zone. With them, we can optimize our booster stations operational run times more efficiently.”

“QUALITY ON TAP!” The choice to work with Engineering America again was an easy one, says Schmidt.

“The slogan on our water tanks is ‘Quality on Tap!’ It means our rural water system strives to produce potable drinking water that meets or exceeds all South Dakota Department of Energy and Natural Resource requirements. It also means that quality is super important to us.”

“Engineering America has been around for 35 years and the crews are great to work with. The community is very pleased, and our board members all find it to be a well-done project. Plus, the tanks are matching now. They look great, and that’s important too because they can be seen from miles around,” he says. WE

Back by Popular Demand!

VOODOO HYDROLOGY Pitfalls of Urban Hydrology Methods & What You Need to Know

Thursday, Jan. 21st As a water community, we have for years relied upon common urban stormwater hydrologic design methodologies and trusted their results. But, should we?

Join Andy Reese as he exposes the black box of urban hydrology. In this webinar, Andy will (with his normal humor) “lay bare” the popular urban stormwater methodologies, as well as their key elements, assumptions, most common misuses, and proper application.

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GUEST COMMENTARY | JOHN SALA

AMR-to-AMI Systems Making Migration Path Simpler The road from AMR to AMI

THE RADIO FREQUENCY (RF) technology that revolutionized the water utility industry in the 1990s and 2000s made automatic meter reading (AMR) easier than ever before, making a process that took weeks on foot possible within days using a mobile, drive-by method. It also improved safety for meter reading personnel, freeing them from walking busy streets, dealing with homeowners’ dogs, and even from entering vaults or basements to obtain readings.

In the early-to-mid 2000s, metering technology continued to evolve beyond basic reading and billing functions. Fixed network collectors were added to the mix, providing for meter readings without the need to roll a truck, as well as enabling the transmission of meter readings multiple times per day. The collection of more data, more frequently led to the next metering frontier, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI).

Today’s innovative AMR and AMI systems have advanced to the point where the better name might be “AMR-to-AMI” systems. That’s because metering technology such as that found in Neptune Technology Group’s R900 Systems is providing water utilities tools that not only make it easy to track water consumption and capture non-revenue water, but also migrate from walk-by to mobile to fixed network data collection without stranding assets in the field.

PHASING IN ROUTES FOR REMOTE READINGS In western Pennsylvania, in 2011, assistant manager Tom Ceraso decided to move the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County toward an R900 AMR system in part because of its ready flexibility in terms of both migration and function, with a focus on compatibility with a mixed meter population, the ability to collect readings quickly and accurately, and ease of transferring data to existing billing software.

The Authority had the freedom and the ability to phase in mobile reading alongside other manual routes, all within the same system. In a matter of months, it went from walking manual routes to running an RF-based metering system that allows it to go far beyond basic meter reading and billing.

Currently, the Authority is investigating the placement of a fixed network data collector within a borough containing a large number of RF-equipped encoder registers. Ceraso mentions how targeted fixed network data collection would be ideal for hard-to-access accounts, such as gated commercial and industrial customers. In all these applications, the meters, encoders, RF meter interface units (MIUs), and host soft-

ware remain the same, allowing for a seamless transition without stranding existing assets.

The system is proving its versatility with regard to functionality, too, in pressure zones in a lot of hilly areas.

“We also have demand areas where we want to look at how much water we’re pumping compared to what we’re billing,” adds Ceraso. “We’re starting to coordinate changeouts [in these places] for RF saturation, so that we can drive through and discover non-revenue water in a short period of time instead of every 90 days.”

Ceraso likes what he has seen, and anticipates even more benefits in the future: “The installation of this technology will have a spin-off effect throughout every department across the Authority because of the efficiencies it’s going to create.”

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A SMOOTH TRANSITION AT A UTILITY’S CHOSEN PACE By the late 2000s, the water meters in the Town of Fort Erie, Ontario, Water Distribution System had reached the end of their lifecycle. Accuracy was a problem, and having to hire a third party to manually probe each residence added to the inefficiency. At one point, a single meter tech was tasked with addressing nearly 1,200 outstanding work orders. Even with a limited budget and resources, Grant Boutin, the Town’s manager of water and wastewater services, knew he had to move his utility forward, but at Fort Erie’s own pace.

For Fort Erie, the large-scale changeout of every meter from manual to RF reading could have been intimidating, but with a migratable system, it wasn’t necessary to do everything at once. Since 2009, Boutin and his team have implemented “a geographic sweep of the town, contracting out 1,000 installations each year, with an additional 300 done inhouse for areas that fall outside a ‘zone’ that present problems for readers.”

Boutin found that the right system selection made the move to AMR easy, smooth, and affordable for Fort Erie. “It’s enabled us to phase in our system over time,” he says.

Boutin looks forward to migrating to a fully mobile system using a mobile data collector in the next few years.

It will collect information—including 96 days of historical consumption data—from the same endpoints, while still allowing for the use of handhelds as backup. And while the migratable system protects the Town’s existing assets, the move to a totally mobile system will empower Fort Erie to perform its own meter readings without the need for a third-party contractor. This alone will net a savings of $100,000.

In the meantime, the Town is enjoying how fast, accurate data has streamlined operations. “Our being responsive to our customers in a timely

fashion—that’s huge for us,” says Boutin.

A BACKWARDCOMPATIBLE FIXED NETWORK The Public Works Utilities (PWU) of Billings, MT, began implementing radio frequency-transmitting MIUs in May 2003, using handhelds first and then a mobile data collector to get the meter readings. In a short period of time, Billings no longer needed its two full-time reading positions.

In 2012, the City added fixed network data collectors to its existing metering system to collect multiple meter readings every day and help customers who might have leaks or excessive water consumption. With installation of these fixed network collectors nearly complete, the PWU can already collect 94% of its readings without rolling a truck.

The same has applied to off-cycle reads. “When a tenant moves out and the water goes back under the landlord’s name, we used to have to roll out a truck,” says field supervisor Mark Holmes. “We don’t anymore, and that’s saved us 50 work orders a month.”

It’s not just for the regular meter readings that Billings is saved from having to send out utility vehicles.

The transition to fixed network has been very smooth, with technology that is backward-compatible with different types of reading methods. The installed fixed collectors work just as easily with the PWU’s host software, encoders, and MIUs as the mobile data collectors and the handheld units that came before. In fact, personnel still use mobile reading as a backup method in case a collector goes down or to double-check RF signals before leaving an MIU installation site.

And although the focus of migrating to fixed network reading has been to roll fewer service trucks and improve customer service, the City has nonetheless cut the number of hours per week it reads by half, from 12 to just six.

What’s next for the Public Works Utilities’ AMR/AMI system? “After we

add the last fixed collector, we’ll continue fine tuning, so that we’ll be able to read every meter through the fixed network,” says division manager Dwile Weagel. As part of those efforts, he’s eager to install more powerful, 1-watt MIUs to address hard to read applications.

CONCLUSION As proven by the Municipal Authority of Westmoreland County, PA; the Town of Fort Erie, Ontario Water Distribution System; and the Publics Works Utilities of Billings, MT, today’s water utilities have more options when it comes to both selecting and expanding upon an automatic meter reading system. First, they can choose which components of a metering system to implement, at their own pace. This flexibility gives them confidence that the system they put in place today will not be obsolete in the near future, while providing the added convenience of backward compatibility, too, when needed.

They also can migrate their system forward, building onto existing assets whenever they’re ready to do so, with innovative enhancements designed to work seamlessly with investments they’ve made.

With additional features and expanded functionality, water utilities can mix and match AMR with AMI technologies according to their unique requirements, so that it all works together under a united software platform. Which of the system’s enhanced features a utility chooses to deploy, as well as when, can be purely business decisions as needs change over time. WE John Sala has over 25 years of combined utility and utility software vendor experience and currently serves Neptune Technology Group as director of marketing supporting all Neptune AMR/ AMI software and field data collection hardware.

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GUEST COMMENTARY | AARON ZAHN

Infrastructure Innovation Critical for Addressing Water Crises THOSE WHO BELIEVE THAT problems are opportunities may already be aware of the global problem surrounding eroding and antiquated infrastructure.

Infrastructure comprises the fundamental facilities and services that are essential for an economy to function and societal living conditions to be sustained or enhanced. These facilities and services typically include bridges, tunnels, airports, water supply, sewers and sanitation, power and power distribution, communications, etc. When it comes to responding to the global water crisis, I believe infrastructure innovation is critical.

The World Economic Forum’s annual Global Risks report released in January of 2015 identified the water crisis as the most serious problem facing the world today—for the first time, ahead of infectious disease epidemics, weapons of mass destruction, or even climate change. It cited drought, water quality, flooding, and ecological damage as the four causes.

Water worries in the US extend beyond California and western states.

Even in south Florida, which receives 60 inches of rain per year, shortages persist due to lack of favorable groundwater replenishment caused by nutrient pollution (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus). Conditions such as these are forcing some municipalities to upgrade from traditional wastewater treatment and biosolids/organic waste management to technologies that will allow them environmentally beneficial and economically viable reuse. But the transition is not fast enough.

LEADING WITH TECHNOLOGY INNOVATION Archaic thought and technology have been plaguing this industry. There

is clearly a fundamental disconnect between its basic infrastructure and our society’s general, more pervasive technical revolution.

Until EPA granted approval in 2010 for a new technology aimed at treating and reutilizing wastewater sludge and organic waste at a fraction of status quo costs and energy consumption, the same antiquated technology (aerobic digestion) had been in use for over 100 years. Despite the extreme progress this country has been experiencing during the same period (national and private space exploration, smartphones, artificial intelligent computers, the move to self-driving cars, etc.), the wastewater treatment needle barely budged. It’s almost inconceivable that these utilities are not able to lower capital investments, operating costs, and energy consumption with all the advancements that are occurring around them.

Making the situation worse, these facilities are charged with meeting regulatory requirements that protect the public’s health and the environment at reasonable and fair rates. Technology

innovation is essential for enabling these facilities to provide more cost-effective and more environmentally advantageous services. There is an urgent need to shift how we view wastewater treatment and move to sustainable, strategic infrastructure solutions that deliver energy-saving technologies, while meeting increasing demand spawned by population growth.

It is urgent we replace antiquated technologies within existing sites. At the same time, technology must enable higher levels of resource recovery (such as phosphorus and nitrogen) during wastewater treatment in order to reduce landfill use and improve soil quality— two extremely high-priority environmental issues that are reflected in more stringent local, state, and national regulations.

ENERGYEFFICIENCY Although energy efficiency has not historically been at the top of the list of priorities in the wastewater treatment industry, it is becoming a primary budget and environmental concern for municipal plants. They are the largest

HIDDEN RISK EXAMPLES 1. Escalating transportation and disposition expenses related to biosolids disposal—municipalities regularly fail to look at the medium and long-term impact of this. They typically let one-year T&D contracts and have the attitude that taking the cheapest option now won’t cost them big increases later. Florida has experienced double and triple increases over one to three years by haulers in places with the tightening regulation on land application and landfills refusal to take material.

2. Aging personnel—many wastewater treatment folks are 60 or more years old, and experienced help is hard to find. Simpler operations due to innovative technology helps make this transition easier and potentially cheaper by being able to hire younger less experienced personnel.

3. Future failing infrastructure—capital expenses now or in the future that might be avoided by adopting advanced technologies.

4. A lack of short-, medium-, and long-term economic modeling capabilities.

5. A lack of understanding of what a utility spends on wastewater treatment and how it breaks down between the categories (i.e., polymer, electricity, odor control).

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consumer of energy produced in the US (3–4%), with biosolids treatment often drawing 30–50% of this energy consumption. Energy cost is the second-highest budget item for municipal wastewater facilities, after labor costs, eating up as much as 30–40% of a municipality’s total energy bill. The 20% increase in demand projected by EPA will make municipalities more hard-pressed than ever to reduce energy consumption by their largest users.

Thanks to newer EPA-approved chemical technologies, municipalities can replace their energy-intensive aerobic digestion systems. The greatest demand for energy in wastewater treatment (approximately 30–50%) is for providing oxygen to a biological system (aerobic digestion) that is outmoded by today’s standards. Now there is a lowenergy treatment alternative to conventional aeration that can be implemented within existing infrastructures.

Approval of new solutions in the last few years marks a milestone in innovating wastewater treatment and biosolids management. These solutions have been used to pre-treat municipal biosolids prior to other processes with very positive results related to secondary sludge, blends of primary and secondary sludge, and blends of secondary sludge and post-consumer food waste prior to aerated static pile composting.

Pre-treatment of secondary sludge or blended waste is proven to lessen cake odor while improving dewatering characteristics. The effect of these technologies when combined with sludge-drying technologies has demonstrated enhanced dewatering characteristics of biosolids, a substantial reduction in thermal energy required for drying, and reduced odor, resulting in significant cost and energy benefits in material handling and storage.

ACCESS TO INNOVATIONS THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS Lingering effects of the global economic recession have placed additional financial burden on wastewater utilities concerned with meeting increasingly strict discharge requirements with aging infrastructure in need of repair and replacement. The introduction of a new technology is also an appropriate time to consider reforming traditional project delivery methods to help biosolids treatment facilities address capital and operating challenges. In addition, technology innovators can accelerate adoption of their disruptive technologies by initiating public and private partnerships that are structured to provide attractive financial and service support.

Cost reductions are immediately available to the public sector if there are: (1) hidden risks (see sidebar for examples); (2) accessible innovations

available only through private offerings; (3) efficiency improvements created by private industry expertise; or, (4) underutilized assets. These four elements create the “Gross Competitive Advantage of the Private Sector.” The graphic above details the benefits of public-private partnerships to the public and private counterparties.

As an example, a partnership for the management of biosolids could entail a cost-effective offering that would help

municipalities reduce overall installation costs, operating costs, and reduce regulatory risk (due to decreasing availability of disposition outlets). Specific components of this comprehensive solution could include: • Wastewater treatment facility and process design, construction, and maintenance • Transportation • Disposition of biosolids on a longterm basis along with nutrient management plans • Permitting and managing disposition sites • Private sector responsibility for the marketing of products and/or energy produced for reuse

SUSTAINABLE FUTURE To help ensure a sustainable infrastructure with adequate supplies of water, we must continue to develop innovative technologies and approaches that reduce the “frictional” cost of adoption and proliferation of solutions, reduce consumption (energy, water, commodities, etc.), and ultimately produce products and/ or energy from waste streams for reuse. Accelerating the rate in which new concepts and technologies are vetted and integrated throughout infrastructures in the United States and the world can be the single greatest lever we have in solving our global infrastructure deficit. I challenge thought leaders around the globe to join me in making basic infrastructure to be cheaper, more environmentally responsible, and more productive—as well as last longer. We owe it to the generations to come. WE Aaron F. Zahn is President and CEO of BCR Environmental Corp. and NuTerra Management LLC. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 53

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ShowCase KAMSTRUP

Water utilities around the world have improved the efficiency of their meter reading operations, reduced costs, and increased revenues using Kamstrup’s flowIQ smart water meters and automated meter reading system. The AMR system—called READy—turns your smartphone or tablet into a meter reading device. Using Google Maps, READy locates all meter points and reads meters while you drive. www.kamstrup.com

XYLEM INC.

High-accuracy, simple SDI-12 communication and advanced design are just a few features of the new WaterLOG Nile Series (Nile 502, Nile 504, Nile 517) radar water level sensors, released this week by WaterLOG—a Xylem brand. The Nile series operates based on the time-of-flight method. Radar impulses are emitted by an antenna, reflected off the product (water surface), and received again by the radar system. This provides the most precise measurement data in water level applications requiring non-contact transmission. This series of WaterLOG instruments is designed to be mounted on the side of bridges or other enclosures above surface water. The rugged, innovative design was built for extreme environmental conditions—making this series ideal for tough to reach sites. www.waterlog.com/nile

THE TORO CO.

The Toro Co. is adding five new 0.75-inch rotor models to its best-selling T5 RapidSet Series rotor product line. This includes the Shrub, Shrub Effluent, 12-inch High Pop, 12-inch High Pop Effluent, and Lawn Effluent models. The tool-free arc adjustment of the patent-pending RapidSet feature allows the arc orientation and angle to be quickly set or changed through a straightforward combination of twists of the nozzle turret.

The T5 RapidSet rotor’s unique slip clutch makes the no tools arc adjustment possible, while also protecting the turret gears and components from damage. The rotor can be adjusted to cover arcs of 40–360 degrees. Similar to the T5 RapidSet lawn model, which was introduced early last year, the Shrub and High Pop models also feature Toro’s Airfoil Technology nozzles. The nozzles’ geometries are specially-designed for the T5 and create a low pressure zone just beneath the nozzle openings, which delivers a better up-close watering profile and leading overall distribution uniformity. www.toro.com/T5

CRANE PUMPS & SYSTEMS

Water Efficiency’s ShowCase is based on information supplied by manufacturers. Some manufacturers did not respond to requests for information. Publication of materials received is subject to editing and space availability.

Pre-assembled Barnes Fiberglass Lift Stations provide a custom solution for applications ranging from residential, commercial, industrial construction, aged lift stations, and housing developments. They are available in Pipe Rail Simplex/ Duplex and Hard Piped Simplex Systems and are offered in a wide range of sizes.

Other selection options include simplex/duplex design, pump, cover, and control panel. Stations can be purchased with or without a pump; a selection of Barnes sewage ejectors, effluent, grinder, or sump pumps are available. The online configurator tool and technical sales staff makes the configuration process easy to select the right components for each unique application. www.cranepumps.com

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AMERICAN FIBERGLASS TANK REPAIR

Extend tank service life with state-of-the-art anti-corrosion protection from American Fiberglass Tank Repair (AFTR). Better-than-when-new tank lining systems utilize today’s resin and veil components to upgrade existing tanks beyond their factory standard coatings. Working with manufacturers, AFTR’s technical engineers pinpoint the latest resin and veil formulations compatible with existing tank substrates. AFTR works with custom blended isophthalic and terephthalic polyester, vinylester, and epoxy resins, as well as over 45 fiberglass mat, chopped strand, Nexus, Harlar, and carbon veil laminates. Specializing in fiberglass tanks, AFTR offers tank linings, repair, inspection, insulation, and nozzle repair. www.americanfiberglasstank.com

ACLARA

STAR ZoneScan is the industry’s leading, remotely correlated acoustic leak-detection system that cost-effectively identifies small leaks before they become big problems.

The system combines acoustic data loggers with Aclara’s STAR Network technology to provide fully integrated leak detection through fixed-network advanced metering infrastructure. Time-synchronized sound recordings are initiated through the STAR ZoneScan transmission unit, which sends the resulting data back to the utility through fixed-network infrastructure. Web-based application software correlates the data between loggers and provides visual identification of high probability leak locations. www.aclara.com

SEEKING BOOK PROPOSALS ForesterPress is seeking book proposals and manuscript submissions on current topics of high interest to civil engineers; municipal infrastructure professionals; consultants; industry professionals responsible for meeting soil, water, and energy compliance standards; academics; and other environmental-quality professionals.

We publish practical, progressive, reference, and professional development books in the following subject areas: Stormwater Management • Soil Erosion and Sediment Control • Construction-Site Compliance and Best Management Practices • Solid Waste Management • Water Efficiency and Conservation • Onsite Energy Management We offer generous royalties, high production quality, and effective marketing campaigns that target your book’s intended audience.

Acquisitions Editor ForesterPress PO Box 3100 Santa Barbara, CA 93130 Phone: 805-682-1300 Fax: 805-682-0200 acquisitions@forester.net

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To submit your book proposal: Include a detailed description of the content, an annotated table of contents and a comprehensive outline, a sample chapter on the book’s topic, your curriculum vitae, and the names of recommended reviewers to: Designing and Reviewing Effective Sediment and Erosion Control Plans

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AdEdge Technologies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.adedgetechnologies.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Cover 4 American Leak Detection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.americanleakdetection.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Amtech Tank Lining . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.armorshieldlining.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Crane Pumps & Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.cranepumps.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 National Rural Water Association. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.nrwa.org . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Neptune Technology Group Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.neptunetg.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Plast-O-Matic Valves Inc. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.plastomatic.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Rain Water Solutions. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.rainwatersolutions.com. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Seametrics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.seametrics.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Smith and Loveless . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . www.smithandloveless.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016 WATER EFFICIENCY 57

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Reader Profile

By Carol Brzozowski

RICHARD WESTERFIELD

A

s Columbus, OH’s water division administrator, Richard Westerfield has his work cut out for him.

The division provides about 140 million gallons per day of drinking water to 1.1 million people, including those in 22 suburbs. The city’s three water treatment plants are rated at 125 million gallons per day (MGD); one is being upgraded to 90 MGD, and one is 50 MGD. Columbus—the nation’s 15th largest city—is a thriving, vibrant, and growing community, notes Westerfield. That has led to more than $1 billion in capital improvement programs since he came on board 11 years ago. Water supply and treatment capabilities continue to be upgraded to meet growth. Westerfield keeps his finger on the pulse of challenges such as a recent nitrate event following fertilizer applications from farmers and other sources in the watershed. That’s being addressed through a $35 million ion exchange process at Columbus’ second-largest plant. Its largest plant is downstream of a large water supply reservoir where algae problems resulted in taste and odor issues.

Ozone and biological filters added to that plant are expected to address that.

The two largest water plants are surface-water plants subject to water quality variations, such as a large rainfall that may increase the raw water source turbidity, or salt runoff from roads in the winter. Columbus has a major leak detection program to identify and repair leaks. Ten years ago, the city began a major water line rehabilitation program costing $30 million annually. Three years ago, the water division completed a comprehensive master plan for water line rehabilitation and replacement for the next 30–50 years using the triple bottom line concept, encompassing financial, environmental, and social issues.

What He Does Day to Day Westerfield spends most of his time in meetings and providing direction and leadership to the water division’s 535 employees. He directs various projects under design, oversees operation and maintenance programs, and helps ensure optimal customer services.

What Led Him to This Line of Work As a child, Westerfield examined water samples collected from a nearby pond under a microscope. “I always had a love for biology and chemistry,” he says. His father was a civil engineer, serving as Dayton, OH’s chief engineer for

more than 30 years.

Westerfield earned a B.S. in civil engineering and an M.S. in civil and environmental engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a Ph.D. in public administration from Kennedy Western University. He then worked as a design engineer in environmental engineering with Woolpert in Dayton, a wastewater treatment engineer for the city of Dayton, and a deputy director of sanitary engineering for Ohio’s Montgomery County before becoming Columbus’ water administrator.

What He Likes Most About His Work “The fact that we’re providing drinking water—truly the lifeblood of this community, economically and otherwise—and maintaining public health throughout the provision to more than a million people is what excites me,” says Westerfield. He’s proud of the value the division places on environmental stewardship, sustainability, and asset management.

In 2014, the department achieved ISO 14001 certification. The city also has received a Platinum Award for Utility Excellence from the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies for its environmental and asset management programs. Westerfield credits the staff in the water division and citywide staff for being “very enjoyable, competent, knowledgeable, caring people to work with.”

His Biggest Challenge Staying ahead of environmental regulations to ensure what the public may not even realize it needs in terms of water quality, while doing so at a reasonable rate, is Westerfield’s biggest challenge. Compared to other large municipalities, Columbus is in the middle of the rate range, he says. In addition to its strategic plan, Columbus’ water division has a climate change plan. “Studies indicate this part of the country should experience greater precipitation, but it may come down faster all at once and disappear for periods of time.

We need to plan for and construct water reservoirs that can take care of drought situations.”

To address the need for a well-trained and motivated workforce, the division started a nationally-recognized public utility mentoring program whereby managers and administrators help employees achieve their goals. WE Carol Brzozowski specializes in topics related to water resource management and technology.

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