Efficient Deliveries for Badger Mountain

Badger Mountain Irrigation District (BMID) supplies drinking and irrigation water to several thousand customers in the Tri-Cities region of Washington. Its Yakima River water is lifted 560 feet over Badger Mountain and delivered via pressurized pipe, which is efficient but energy demanding. As the district urbanizes and its infrastructure ages, its main challenges are increasing efficiency and maintaining its system.

In this interview, Colby Getchell, BMID’s district manager, speaks with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about his district’s infrastructure and his efficiency goals.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Colby Getchell: I am from South Bend, Washington, a small coastal town mostly known for its oyster industry, but which also thrives from logging and lumber mills in the area. My family background is in the lumber business. My dad worked in lumber mills; my grandfather owned a lumber mill and worked as a log scaler in the early 1900s. I moved here in 2011 and started working for BMID as part of the field crew. In 2015, I took over as district manager. The district was looking for somebody who knew the system and could run and operate it without any issues. What piqued my interest most is that my background is mostly in irrigation construction. I have been in the irrigation business most of my life now. Kris Polly: Please tell us about BMID and its history.

Colby Getchell: BMID was founded in 1975 to bring water from the Yakima River and McNary Pool all the way over to the south side of Badger Mountain in Richland, Washington, which is at a higher elevation. It was previously all dry land, and it was going to be used mostly for farming in small communities. Today, BMID provides irrigation and domestic drinking water. We supply about 2,200 outlets and about 4,800 acres of irrigated agricultural and residential land.

Kris Polly: How many employees do you have?

Colby Getchell: We have a total of seven. We have three in the office: an office manager, an administrative assistant, and me. In the field, we have four crew. We also have a three-person board of directors.

Kris Polly: Is your service area still primarily agricultural, and is it being urbanized?

Colby Getchell: We’re rapidly moving from agricultural to urban. Most of the developments are homes, not commercial properties. I would say that within the next 10 years, the district will go from mostly agricultural to mostly residential. Right now, the acreage is probably split 50/50 between residential and irrigators.

Richland, Washington, seen from Badger Mountain.

Kris Polly: What kind of adjustments will that require on BMID’s part?

Colby Getchell: It is going to cause issues, because this system was built mainly for agricultural purposes and to run over a 24-hour period. We’re going to see a lot of issues with pressure drops and velocity spikes when we start converting to a more residential customer base. I think the biggest task for us is just trying to keep up with the rapid pace of development. Adjustments we will need to make are partly addressed in the planning of the newly developing residential areas that are slowly taking over the agricultural sections of land in our district. One of the things we’ve already started to implement in newer subdivisions is alternating water schedules. In order to take a little more stress off our system, we have residential customers with odd-numbered addresses use water on odd-numbered days and those with even-numbered addresses use water on even-numbered days. We also try to control every subdivision with a minimum pressure to make sure we are keeping as much stress off the system as we can while still maintaining optimum flow to the customer.

Kris Polly: Will you need new infrastructure to address that?

Colby Getchell: Yes. As we build out, we’re addressing that with the infrastructure that we’re adding. Our new standards are intended to make sure that we don’t have issues like that in the future. We have some areas where we will have to address issues with larger pipe size. It is an original system, and while it’s not as old as some in the area, the fact that it is underground and pressurized means that it does see a lot of wear, especially the older steel lines.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about BMID’s infrastructure and when it was built.

Colby Getchell: It was built in 1975. We have about 2½ miles of 48-inch

"The biggest task for us is just trying to keep up with the rapid pace of development."

— Colby Getchell

BMID’s new fish screens during and after installation.

A section of BMID’s 48-inch main is replaced.

pipe that brings water from the Yakima where we have a river pumping station. We have six vertical turbine pumps there that provide about 8,000 horsepower. They push the water up a vertical elevation of 560 feet through the 48-inch main to the south side of Badger Mountain in South Richland, where we have 14 booster pumps, each 200 horsepower.

Kris Polly: In addition to your piping, do you have open canals?

Colby Getchell: We don’t. We have only fully pressurized underground pipes. We do have one large reservoir, which sits right in the saddle of Badger Mountain. It supplies pressure for the north side and storage for the south side. That reservoir is what controls our entire system: Once it fills, our river pumps start shutting down, and if it drops to a certain level, they start coming back online.

Kris Polly: Do you own all of your infrastructure?

Colby Getchell: We do.

Kris Polly: Would you tell us about the power needs of the pumping station and the pressurized system?

Colby Getchell: Our power needs are huge. Power is almost 50 percent of our budget. It is easily the largest expense, which means that our rates fluctuate mostly due to rate hikes we see in power costs. The major energy cost that we see comes from the river pumping station. We pump 12,000 acre-feet per year on average. I think its energy consumption is around 8–9 million kilowatt-hours a year.

Kris Polly: Do you have strategies for trying to find low-cost energy?

Colby Getchell: Unfortunately, we buy power for the river station through the City of Richland, which means that we cannot search around for cheaper sources. We do work closely with the city to try to figure out when it’s going to need rate increases and things like that, but the city is in charge of buying energy. We do try to make our facility as efficient as possible. Considering the number of pumps we have and the amount of water and energy we use, the efficiency of the system is good. Our whole system is capable of shutting off and maintaining pressure, and once there’s demand again, the system will start back up.

Kris Polly: Are you undertaking any public outreach efforts to educate your new residential customers who may not be familiar with irrigation water?

Colby Getchell: Yes. We have a website that everybody can go on. In the last 2 years, we’ve also started publishing a flyer that we’re trying to get out to everybody to educate them on yard maintenance, how to conserve water, and the issues caused by urbanization. Hopefully, that will alleviate some pressure on us when we have to enforce things like alternating schedules.

Kris Polly: What are your other top issues today?

Colby Getchell: My biggest issue is making sure our infrastructure is updated. We have a lot of old piping that needs to be replaced. In 2016, we completed the replacement of our traveling fish screen. That was one of the larger infrastructure projects BMID has completed in the last 15 years. We ended up using a Hydrolox material; it is probably the largest fish screening station anywhere in Washington using that material. It worked pretty well for us. That was one of the first upgrades we did. The other one that I have coming up is going to be replacing the manifold at our river pumping station.

Our 48-inch main is our main penstock or transmission line for the entire system. We don’t have the ability, or the funds, anyway, to dig it up and replace it as it sits due to the location. I couldn’t even imagine how much it would cost. It runs by homes and under roads and canals. My big goal right now is to develop a plan within the next 5 years to keep that line in place, but to find a way to structurally preserve it as long as possible. There’s a lot of new technology out there that can help us do that. Right now, I’m looking at fiberreinforced polymer. Preserving this line will not only save money for the district, it will make sure we have the ability to keep the district viable into the future.

Kris Polly: What kinds of funding strategies are you using?

Colby Getchell: Our expenditures have all been out of pocket. For our fish screens, we did get a grant through the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office, although we paid for the majority of the costs. For the future projects I have planned so far, we probably will not need additional funding sources. This district has no outstanding debt. We should be able to fund the planned projects through the next 2–5 years.

Kris Polly: What else would you like BMID to do in the future?

Colby Getchell: I would like us to increase our efficiency. The more efficient any district or business is, the better its outcomes are going to be. That will lead to better conservation as well. We can also create efficiency in our dayto-day operations, whether by making sure our pumps are running properly or by moving forward to add more variable-frequency drives to our system and using new technology. I would also like to see us reduce water loss. There are a lot of recurring leaks in some of the older sections of the system that need to be addressed in the near future.

Kris Polly: What are your main strategies for water conservation?

Colby Getchell: We’re trying to pump less water while still making sure we have adequate water for our customers. We are able to control our system a lot better now with the updates we have

BMID’s river pumping station.

made over the last few years; we will continue to improve as technology improves. Maintaining and updating our distribution outlets and control points is vital for conservation. If we can keep our pressures and flows regulated perfectly, we can save water. We’ve achieved a decrease in use of about 500 acre-feet over the last year by updating a lot of the control points and distribution outlets where we have pressurereducing valves.

Kris Polly: Does that account for more of the conservation than individual users’ practices?

Colby Getchell: My aim is to save as much as we can. I think that provides a bigger cost benefit than pushing it to users. I’ve always said that you can only control what you can control. I can’t control my customers. The only thing I can do is try to educate. We’re going to push out as much material as we can to educate them and get them to conserve as much water as they can, but we’ve got to do it here first. In order to do that, we have to control our infrastructure and to try to pump as little as we can while still being able to deliver and meet the demands of our customers. IL

Colby Getchell is the district manager of the Badger Mountain Irrigation District. He can be contacted at bmid@badgermountainirrigation.com. For more information about BMID, visit badgermountainirrigation.com.