F W R J
The Right Tools for Planning: How Pearland Applied Apps, Data Analytics, and Visualization Tools to Optimize its Collection System
T
Kendall Ryan, Ishita Rahman, Bailey Keller, and Jameson Appel
he City of Pearland (city) is home to approximately 130,000 residents and is situated in the southeast Texas metropolitan area 15 minutes south of downtown Houston. The city’s wastewater collection system (Figure 1) consists of five water reclamation facilities (WRFs), approximately 400 mi of gravity wastewater lines ranging from 2 to 54 in., and 70 lift stations throughout the system. The city recently engaged with Freese and Nichols Inc. (FNI) to conduct a wastewater master plan, with the goals of evaluating the existing wastewater system and developing recommendations for five-year and buildout (22year) wastewater capital improvement projects. The result was a $135 million capital improvement plan that included three treatment facility
expansion projects, 15 collection system capacity projects, and 67 lift station and collection system rehabilitation projects. The city is maturing and facing the challenges of aging sanitary sewer infrastructure. As such, the utility staff is focusing more and more dollars on data collection, asset rehabilitation, and system optimization. The wastewater master plan (project) included significant investments in field data collection, hydraulic modeling, condition assessment, and system analyses. Applying efficient methods of visualizing, collecting, and cataloguing large and disparate data sets throughout the project was critical to developing recommendations to optimize the city’s wastewater system.
Kendall Ryan, P.E., is associate and water/ wastewater master planning manager; Ishita Rahman, P.E., is water/wastewater master planning project manager; and Bailey Keller, EIT, is water/wastewater master planning assistant project manager with Freese and Nichols Inc. in Houston. Jameson Appel, PMP, CFM, is engineering and capital projects senior project manager with City of Pearland, in Pearland, Texas. The licenses for Ryan, Rahman, and Keller are in Texas only.
The application of the following three tools was key to the project: S M apping and dashboards to visualize inflow and infiltration (I/I) S M obile apps to collect condition information S F lagging to catalogue hydraulic model data source
Visualizing Inflow and Infiltration
Figure 1. City of Pearland Exiting Wastewater System
12 May 2022 • Florida Water Resources Journal
As part of the wastewater master plan, 32 flow meters and six rain gauges were installed throughout the collection system. The data were also utilized to measure I/I throughout the system and prioritize flow meter basins for future sanitary sewer evaluation study (SSES) projects. Flow meters were generally placed near the WRFs or larger-capacity lift stations and strategically situated throughout the system so that the linear footage of gravity lines between each flow meter was relatively consistent (Figure 2). Consideration was also given to areas of the wastewater system with known or suspected I/I issues. For this project, flow monitoring was conducted from February to May 2019, for a total duration of 91 days. The flow meters and rain gauges utilized in this study have the ability to collect data in five-minute increments, which resulted in over 26,000 data points per flow meter and rain gauge. During the monitoring period, seven significant
