Municipal Water Leader July/August 2021

Volume 8 Issue 7

July/August 2021

How Tarrant Regional Water District Responded to the Texas Winter Storm

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Municipal Water Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for July/August and November/December by

an American company established in 2009.

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer Caroline Polly, Production Assistant and Social Media Coordinator Cassandra Leonard, Staff Assistant Milo Schmitt, Media Intern

8

How Tarrant Regional Water District Responded to the Texas Winter Storm

Contents

July/August 2021 Volume 8, Issue 7 5 F acing Down Texas’s Winter Storm

By Kris Polly

22 W eathering Texas’s Winter Storm at the San Jacinto River Authority

8 How

Tarrant Regional Water District Responded to the Texas Winter Storm

28 H ow the Gulf Coast Water Authority Performed Above 100 Percent Capacity During the February Storm

14 R esponding to Freezing Temperatures and Main Breaks at the Fort Worth Water Department

32 H ow RACI’s Casing Spacers Help Municipalities Protect Their Pipes 39 JOB LISTINGS

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions; the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts half-page and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to all drinking water and wastewater entities with annual budgets or sales of $10 million per year or greater as well as to members of Congress and committee staff and advertising sponsors. For address corrections or additions, or if you would prefer to receive Municipal Water Leader in electronic form, please contact us at admin@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright © 2021 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised.

@MuniWaterLeader

Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

4 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

muniwaterleader

COVER PHOTO:

TRWD Director of Operations Darrell Beason and TRWD Water Resource Engineering Director Rachel Ickert.

Photo courtesy of TRWD.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF TRWD.

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Facing Down Texas’s Winter Storm

T

he February 2021 winter storm affected huge portions of the United States, but none more seriously than Texas. The famously hot, arid state was plunged into freezing, even subzero, temperatures, and suffered major power outages. Municipal water providers across the state had to keep up their indispensable services amid freezes, blackouts, and unprecedented levels of demand from consumers worried about running out of water.

In our cover story, we hear about how Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD), the water wholesaler for the Fort Worth region, had to navigate major power outages and freezes. TRWD Director of Operations Darrell Beason and Water Resource Engineering Director Rachel Ickert tell us about how the district decided to temporarily shut down the TRWD transmission system to avoid an unplanned stoppage in power and how district operations staff improvised and innovated to protect and access equipment.

We also hear the City of Forth Worth’s side of the story from Public Relations and Communications Coordinator Mary Gugliuzza. Fort Worth’s water system suffered power outages and 720 main breaks during the storm, and its customer service hotlines were overwhelmed with calls.

Hard work by city staff helped it rebound.

The Houston-area San Jacinto River Authority (SJRA) fared well during the storm: Its backup generators, emergency

By Kris Polly

readiness plans, and large inventory allowed it to provide uninterrupted service and even to aid other agencies and facilities with drinking water. SJRA General Manager Jace Houston and Operations Manager Jason Williams tell us more.

Similarly, we hear from Gulf Coast Water Authority Chief of Staff Jake Hollingsworth about how his agency’s public-private partnership with an energy company meant that it never lost power and was even able to perform above its rated capacity.

Finally, we speak with Josef Reschreiter of RACI and Brad Mehalko of Dallas-headquartered Public Works Products, Inc., the exclusive master distributor of RACI casing spacers, about the advantages of RACI spacers and how the company is seeking to expand its reach across North America.

Texas’s reaction to the February storm shows municipal water suppliers at their most impressive: Battling natural disaster to supply their life-giving services. I hope you find their stories inspiring. M Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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How Tarrant Regional Water District Responded to the Texas Winter Storm

An air/vacuum release valve on TRWD’s system that froze and broke during the storm.

T

arrant Regional Water District (TRWD) supplies raw water to more than 2 million people in and around the city of Fort Worth and manages the federal floodway that runs through the city. Like all critical utilities in Texas, TRWD put extraordinary efforts into continuing to provide its essential services during the winter storm of February 13–17, 2021. In this interview, TRWD Director of Operations Darrell Beason and TRWD Water Resource Engineering Director Rachel Ickert tell Municipal Water Leader about their preparations for the storm, the response to it in real time, and the lessons TRWD will be taking forward to future emergency events.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Rachel Ickert: I joined the district in 2014 as a full-time employee. I worked for Freese & Nichols before that and had worked on projects for TRWD for 11 years, meaning that I’ve been working with the district since 2003. I’m a licensed professional civil engineer and have worked in water supply, design, and planning and in flood control. My group at TRWD oversees our flood modeling and monitoring efforts; water supply management and planning, both long term and shorter term; energy management; and geospatial services, which includes GIS and survey services.

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Fort Worth operations manager, western division operations assistant director, and western division operations director, eventually reaching my current position, director of operations. About 8 years ago, we combined the two operational divisions.

Taking advantage of TRWD’s tuition reimbursement program, I went back to college and graduated in 2011 with a degree in management. I like to say that I was on the 23‑year degree plan.

My current group, the operations department, covers pipeline operations and maintenance; floodway operations and maintenance, including all the maintenance on the on the Trinity River floodway through Fort Worth; reservoirs operation and maintenance; law enforcement; our newly formed emergency management department; and fleet maintenance and management.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about TRWD’s services and infrastructure.

Darrell Beason: TRWD has been around for almost 100 years. Our two primary responsibilities are supplying raw water to municipal customers who treat and distribute it to more than 2 million people and managing the 28‑mile federal floodway that runs through Fort Worth. We have a recreation mission as well, which covers the recreation around the floodway, lakes, and parks. We serve 11 counties centered around Tarrant County. About 80 percent of the water that we supply to Fort Worth is pumped from reservoirs in East Texas.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your experience of the February storm. municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TRWD.

Darrell Beason: I started at TRWD in 1994, at which point it was known as the Tarrant County Water Control and Improvement District No. 1. I started in the carpentry shop, which was similar to what we call now facilities maintenance. Back then we actually did things like building cabinets. I started at the bottom and worked my way through to the positions of construction coordinator,

The floor of one of TRWD’s transmission pump stations.

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An operations crew isolating a broken valve in order to replace it.

The line was in operation, soaking them with water.

Darrell Beason: My group started our preparations when our emergency management group sent out its first situation warnings. We started doing a lot of preparation on our generators and checking supplies. At the time, we thought that we might suffer short-term power outages based on ice loading on the power lines. We had no way of knowing that we would end up suffering massive, long-term blackouts caused by equipment failures. I think the last comparable storm in this region occurred when I was 13 years old. I remember skating on Lake Worth in my tennis shoes and playing hockey with friends.

Rachel Ickert: In the days leading up to the event, the weather forecasts were starting to come in, and we were getting indications from our energy providers that we would see elevated energy prices in the market. We are able to prepurchase part of our expected energy load, but another part of our load rides on the real-time market. The real-time market price is generally $20–$40 per megawatt-hour. We started to see prices in the hundreds and then thousands and we eventually realized that the price would likely hit the $9,000 price cap. We started having conversations about reducing our pumping load before the storm hit. The prices began to increase on February 12 and 13. We reduced the amount of water we were pumping from our East Texas reservoirs on February 13 in response and tried to stay within our prepurchased load when possible.

We were in a pretty good operational position for a few days, but on the night of February 15, Oncor Electric Delivery Company called our energy manager to say that it might have to start taking down transmission grids. We responded that we were a priority user because we provide a critical resource to over 2 million people, but Oncor municipalwaterleader.com

replied that that might not matter because the grids were at a critical point. We asked if we would get a warning before it took down the grids, and the answer was no.

Having our transmission-level pump stations go down with no warning could cause significant damage to our water delivery system. A sudden shutdown is hard on the pumps and the pipeline.

After that call, we all spoke by phone. It was around 11:00 p.m., and a lot of us didn’t have power in our homes at the time. I was sitting by the fireplace. We needed to keep moving our water, but since there was a chance that our stations would go down with no warning, we decided that we might need to take them down proactively. The potential damage would have been worst if we lost power to our Richland Chambers and Cedar Creek stations in East Texas. A power failure to our Benbrook pump station, which pumps out of Benbrook Lake, could have caused some damage, but it wouldn’t have been nearly as serious.

We made the decision to shut down pumping at Richland Chambers and Cedar Creek Reservoirs and to use the Benbrook Lake pump station and the water we had in the earthen balancing reservoirs that sit at high points in our system to supply the system and meet customer water demands. At the time, that all seemed fine and good, but over the next few days, February 15–18, our customer demand started skyrocketing. Our peak primary customer demand on February 18, 536 million gallons, was higher than the demand on a dry summer day. It was difficult to meet that level of demand without pumping, and we estimated that we had less than 1 day of storage left in the balancing reservoirs at that water demand rate.

As time went on and the grid became more stable, we got an opportunity to start bringing some of our pump stations back online. Our customers Joe Smolinski and Jeff Price from the City of Mansfield called and connected us with David Cook, a state representative who is the former mayor of Mansfield, and Oncor’s vice president of regulatory affairs, Liz Jones. After being apprised of the situation, Ms. Jones assured us that we could bring on the pump stations we needed and that we would be considered priority, so that if transmission-level power had to go out, our pump stations wouldn’t go out. We were in uncharted waters. We weren’t 100 percent sure that that meant it was safe to bring everything back up, but we went ahead and started slowly increasing our pumping again.

These decisions involved Darrell’s operations team, water resources engineering, the SCADA team, and our executives.

We made the decisions to take the system down and bring it back up as a team. It was a question of managing system risk while meeting customer demands and keeping an eye on energy prices. Through this whole event, we had staff in constant communication with our customers as parts of their systems were failing. Not once did our customers run out of water from us—I am proud to say that we met our customer demands through it all.

July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT Municipal Water Leader: How can losing power damage your pumps and pipelines?

Darrell Beason: Our normal shutdown process starts with slowing down our pumps. We start closing the valves and reducing the flow. We pinch the pump control valve down to the point at which the water is barely moving through the pump before stopping the pump. It’s a slow, controlled, methodical decrease. In an emergency stop, as would occur with a power outage, the flow in the line stops instantaneously when the pumps stop. This can induce a transient pressure wave, and the pumps can spin backward for a short period of time. The wave takes 3–7 minutes to go from one end of the pipe to the other, and it can cycle back and forth for hours. You risk rupturing a line, which is one of the worst things that can happen. In this case, the roads were covered with ice, and our rights of way were covered with snow, so we wouldn’t even have been able to mobilize equipment to begin a pipeline repair. A repair could have taken weeks, instead of our usual failure response time of 48 hours. Combined with the skyrocketing demand, it would have put us in a bad position. That scenario was discussed during that late-night call on February 15.

Municipal Water Leader: In addition to concerns related to power supply, was there any damage to TRWD’s system caused by power outages or freezing water?

Darrell Beason: February 15 is when we were hit with the possibility of an electric grid failure, but before that, we experienced extremely cold temperatures and rolling blackouts. A lot of our instrumentation lines are protected by a heat trace on the piping itself. As we lost power, the heat trace failed, and the lines froze. We experienced relatively minor damage because of that. A lot of our office buildings went 2–3 days without any electricity or heat, and we had lines freeze, rupture, and flood facilities throughout our system. That damage was spread out pretty evenly over the full length of our system. On the pipeline system, 12 small air pots froze and burst. These caused relatively small leaks and were repaired within a week.

Municipal Water Leader: How did operations staff respond to these unexpected circumstances?

10 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Cows take advantage of the water from a broken valve on TRWD’s system; all the other ponds were frozen over.

Municipal Water Leader: Did TRWD’s emergency planning processes help the agency respond to this event?

Rachel Ickert: Our regular and emergency planning put us in a really good position to be able to communicate and work through this. Our staff know our system so well.

Even without power, and even when the SCADA manager couldn’t see everything, he knew what to do and how to do it. Members of my team knew how to get through our contingency operations and how long the water in storage would last. They had all that information readily available, even when the power was out where they were working.

There is a lot of preparation that you don’t even realize people are always doing until it’s needed. A lot of hard work went into preparing for things like this, even though there is no way we could have predicted exactly what would happen.

Darrell Beason: During emergency management preparation efforts, people often think, “My time would be better spent solving a problem or fixing something,” but our preparation on the front end was so valuable as things started to fall apart. We had an idea of what each other’s departments were going to be doing. We were in as frequent communication as we could be. Cellular towers started to fail toward the end of the event, but up until that point, most of us had phone connections. The internet was in and out, so we were doing most things by telephone.

One silver lining of the COVID‑19 pandemic is that all our planning and management employees were fully capable municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TRWD.

Darrell Beason: Our electricians have two-wheel-drive company trucks, and many used their personal trucks instead to get to our office buildings and maintenance facility sites.

A number of employees used their own vehicles, their own tools, and their own equipment to keep systems going.

Ice loading prevented some of our security gates from operating. Some guys climbed over razor-wire fences to get to pump stations so that they could adjust the controls or take other actions. One electrician was borrowing heaters and propane from his dad and setting them up on site to

keep our pressure transmitters from freezing—those are essentially the eyes of our SCADA operators. Electricians built little makeshift houses out of wood to shelter some of these devices and keep the heat from the heaters from blowing away. The innovation and dedication of our guys was appreciated. They knew that the failure of those systems was not an option. They are the unsung heroes of this event.

ADVERTISEMENT of working from home. Knowing what the other groups were probably doing gave us a lot of peace of mind. We were able to react, not just to sit paralyzed, waiting for confirmation.

We’d already worked through the scenario, and knew that if A happened, then B would happen. All the labor-hours we spent on emergency management training definitely paid off.

Municipal Water Leader: Did you cooperate with other local agencies in your response?

Darrell Beason: During this event, we had some capacity in our flood control group, and we offered assistance to some of our customers. The City of Fort Worth had more than 600 water main breaks. We embedded some of our crews with the city’s crews to help it respond. At one point, we were asked by the emergency management coordinator if we could provide potable water to some locations in the city that were completely out of water. Some of our equipment operators brought in large trucks with potable-water tanks.

More than 10,000 gallons was distributed in 1‑ to 5‑gallon containers. One of our operators told me, nearly with tears in his eyes, that these people hadn’t had water in a week.

These guys had the ability to help others out, and they jumped on that opportunity.

Municipal Water Leader: What changes will you make in your emergency response plans based on your experience of this event?

Rachel Ickert: We knew this event was coming, and we started preparations from an operations and energydemand-reduction standpoint. However, we did not foresee its severity, and we did not have a dedicated meeting about it. Next time something like this is coming in, we need to have a premeeting. We need to run through who will be where and run through some potential scenarios.

We have also noted that we need to remember in the future to make sure that all our balancing reservoirs are as full as possible before an event like this, just as they were this time around.

This event brought to light the fact that certain critical facilities throughout the state were not registered as critical with the power providers. TRWD’s pump stations were registered as critical facilities prior to this event, but we are making sure all the facilities we consider critical are registered, and we want to make sure that that actually means something. We had that criticality designation, but at a certain point, everyone needed to pitch in and help save the grid. From the larger, statewide energy grid standpoint, I sure hope there will be some after-action reviews and planning. That is somewhat out of our hands, except where we may be able to comment on potential legislation.

We are also having after-action meetings with our customers. We hope they will share information with us and municipalwaterleader.com

tell us the things they plan to do in the future. For example, if we have an ability to get them water during an emergency, do they still have the ability to treat it?

Darrell Beason: We need to have deliberate discussions about the potential scenarios in front of us for an event like this. I’m grateful that we were talking every day, but our conversations were more along the lines of, “This is what we’re doing today; this is what we’re doing tomorrow,” than, “Let’s think about 4 or 5 days out.”

Most of the items on the after-action report were small tweaks. We want to change the design of future gates so that their tracks do not fill with ice. We will change the battery capacity on some of our vehicle gate actuators and add manual personnel gates. Our pressure transmitters will be placed in below-ground vaults to decrease the likelihood of freeze damage. We can’t react in a knee-jerk fashion to an event like this. We have to keep in mind the frequency with which these events happen and use our funding in the best possible way. The easy and cheap things that bring the biggest bang for the buck are what we’re focused on today.

We’ve definitely looked at our backup generators. The likelihood of them failing was greater than we previously anticipated. Some of them are old and probably should have been replaced sooner. We will try to replace those with something a little newer and more reliable. Those generators are not big enough to run our pumps; they are simply for communications and to keep our control centers up and running.

There is talk about getting larger generators that would be able to spin up a pump at one of our pump stations during a true black-sky event of a longer duration. We have talked about seeking Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for some of that. We’ve also talked about seeking grants for solar fields. There are a lot of things in the pipeline. We are going to work through them, do business cases on each one, and route them through our capital improvement plan process. Some have been considered in the past. The big difference is that the what if scenarios are now remember when scenarios. M

Darrell Beason is the director of operations at Tarrant Regional Water District.

Rachel Ickert is the water resource engineering director at Tarrant Regional Water District. For more about TRWD, visit www.trwd.com.

July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Responding to Freezing Temperatures and Main Breaks at the Fort Worth Water Department

R

ecord-setting winter storms can pose challenges for any municipal water utility, but they can be especially difficult for a city like Fort Worth, Texas, that is unaccustomed to snow and freezing temperatures. During and after the February 2021 winter storm, the Fort Worth Water Department faced main breaks, frozen equipment, the inability to travel, lack of fuel, and inoperable pump stations and plants, all contributing to large losses of power and water service. In this interview, Mary Gugliuzza, the public relations and communications coordinator for the Fort Worth Water Department, tells Municipal Water Leader about the problems the storm created, how the utility overcame them, and how the city is planning to be better prepared for future disasters.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Mary Gugliuzza: I’ve been with the City of Fort Worth for 25 years. My background is in journalism. I worked for both daily and weekly papers, in tourism for a chamber of commerce, and as an information officer for a hospital and a state mental health/mental disability center before finding my professional home with Fort Worth Water. I held 7 different jobs in 15 years before coming to work for the city.

Municipal Water Leader: Please give us an introduction to the city of Fort Worth Water Department, its history, and its current services.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your distribution system.

14 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Mary Gugliuzza: Fort Worth’s distribution system has more than 3,600 miles of pipe, with 30 ground and elevated storage tanks. The utility operates 32 pump stations, including 3 raw water pump stations and 7 high-service pump stations. Our collection system has more than 3,500 miles of pipes and 34 lift stations. The reclaimed water system is about 12 miles long, with 1 pump station.

Municipal Water Leader: What was your experience of the February storm?

Mary Gugliuzza: In this event, we first had 93 hours of below-freezing temperatures, starting at 5:00 p.m. on February 9 and lasting until February 13. On February 13, temperatures went above the freezing mark for about 3 hours. Then they dipped back down, and we had another 139 consecutive hours below freezing. That second part is when the worst of the weather arrived and the temperatures dipped to their lowest point—4 degrees below zero. We also had some ice and heavy snow. We occasionally get snow in this area, but heavy snow is municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE FORT WORTH WATER DEPARTMENT.

Mary Gugliuzza: Fort Worth Water has been around since about 1882. The city acquired a small private company and grew its water municipal water service from there. We built the Holly pump station in the early 1890s. We completed our first drinking water plant in 1912 and built our first lake in 1914.

Today, we have five drinking water treatment plants and one water reclamation plant. We are seeking a permit to build a second water reclamation facility. Our wastewater plant is permitted at 166 million gallons per day (MGD).

Our total drinking water capacity is 500 MGD. We serve about 1.3 million people, but that estimate will probably increase when the new census data are released. This includes people within the city limits of Fort Worth, small pockets of unincorporated areas outside the city limits, and other cities and entities to which we provide wholesale water, wastewater, or reclaimed water services. We have 32 drinking water wholesale customers, 23 wastewater customers, and 3 reclaimed water wholesale customers. Our service area is over 400 square miles in size.

A 12-inch ball valve ruptured on a high-service pump at the Eagle Mountain Water Treatment Plant.

ADVERTISEMENT not the norm. On the morning of February 11, there was a major accident on I-35 W in Fort Worth that involved more than 100 vehicles and made the national news.

The last significant winter event of this magnitude occurred in December 1983. That year, the temperature stayed below freezing for 269 consecutive hours. There have been other winter events of a lesser magnitude since then, such as those in 1989 and 2011.

The crucial difference this time was that we lost power, which presented challenges not seen in previous events.

We lost power at three of the four water plants that were in service at the time.

Before the event was over, we had all five plants in service to keep up with demand. One plant was out of service for maintenance when the event started.

Those plant power outages occurred multiple times, they overlapped, and they lasted for extended periods. The Eagle Mountain plant was without power for over 12 consecutive hours.

We also lost power at pump stations and lift stations. We had generators at many of those facilities, and we have some large portable generators that we can move around. However, one stationary generator at a key pump station failed during the event, even though it passed testing the week before.

The outages came with little warning. By 2:00 a.m. on Monday, February 15, we were experiencing our first round of outages at pump stations and plants. Since Friday, February 12, we had had 24‑hour coverage by instrumentation, electrical, and maintenance staff at our plants in anticipation of challenges caused by the weather. This allowed us to respond quickly. When the power did come back, getting the plants back in service was not easy, because valves, controls, and chemical feed lines were frozen. The city’s emergency operations center issued a request for portable heaters to help us thaw out.

That was crucial to getting the Eagle Mountain plant back in service. It was back in service around 3:00 p.m. on municipalwaterleader.com

An online interactive map allowed customers to see where main breaks were and the status of the break—assigned, work in progress, or completed. This image is from March 1.

February 16. It took 2 days to fully restore pressure in the system.

On the afternoon of February 15, we issued boil water notices for the northside pressure planes, which are primarily served by the Eagle Mountain plant, because we weren’t able to maintain the minimum required pressure. Some parts of the system did go dry. These boil water notices ended on February 19.

Municipal Water Leader: Did you suffer main breaks?

Mary Gugliuzza: Based on the forecast and past experience, we expected to see an increase in main breaks because of temperature differentials. Lake Worth is the shallowest of our lakes. It feeds our North Holly and South Holly water treatment plants. Our plan was to keep that water within our Holly pressure plane and not send it to surrounding

pressure planes, minimizing the areas where we would see main breaks.

Unfortunately, we had to abandon that strategy when we experienced the power outages at the treatment plants.

We had to ramp up capacity at South Holly and bring North Holly online to meet demand and to move water to other parts of the system.

Once we started moving water out of the Holly pressure plane into the other areas, we saw an increase in main breaks. From February 11 to 27, we suffered 720 main breaks. For comparison, in all of 2020, we had 649 main breaks with the same pipe in the ground. That illustrates the role water temperature played in the breaks.

The main breaks created challenges for us, especially on the west side of our system. On February 18, we issued a boil water notice for the four westside pressure planes. This notice was lifted on February 21.

July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT Expecting an increase in main breaks, we made arrangements in advance to have contractors on standby in case we needed their assistance. In the end, we brought on several contractors to assist with the main break repairs.

In the first several days, the temperatures were so cold that employees had to take frequent breaks and get in their trucks to warm up, which made repairs take longer. If they put tools on the ground, they would freeze to the ground.

The pneumatic tools also had problems in the extreme cold.

Through it all, we were working around the clock.

On February 14, water usage stood around 141 MGD.

By February 16, it was up to 325 MGD. Unfortunately, a lot of that water was going back on the ground because of all the main breaks. We set a peak day record of 389.4 million gallons on February 18. Those are record numbers we would expect to see during a dry, hot summer, not in the winter.

Our field staff and plant operations staff stepped up to meet the extra demand and worked hard to avoid a systemwide boil water notice. We had generators at a lot of pump stations, and most of them did maintain operations.

We made sure to go into the event will all our chemical storage filled. Some facilities in Texas almost ran out of chemicals. We did have to divert a shipment of chlorine from one of our water plants to our wastewater plant.

Municipal Water Leader: What changes did you see in demand from your customers throughout this event?

Municipal Water Leader: Did the water department make efforts to distribute water through alternate channels?

Mary Gugliuzza: Yes, we did. Initially, getting bottled water was a problem. Working with the city’s emergency operation center, we distributed quite a lot of bottled water and

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Municipal Water Leader: What changes do you anticipate making to prepare for other storms or similar emergency events in the future?

Mary Gugliuzza: We’ve identified a lot of things. Regarding capital improvements, our 5‑year projected budget includes substantial investment for water line rehabilitation and replacement. We’re enclosing some of those open-air highservice pump stations. We purchased propane heaters so that we will not have to rely on electricity for our heaters.

We are working with our electric provider to bring highvoltage service to the Eagle Mountain plant. We are considering onsite power generation for the Westside water treatment plant.

We also plan to improve our internal incident command structure and the training communications that go along with that. We also need to work with the city to leverage our capabilities to meet our customers’ expectations. Our MyH2O program will have a customer portal soon, which will help us with direct customer communications. The city has an app, too. We were working with it prior to this event, and our portion of the app launched in early June. Customers can now report main breaks and sewer backups through the app. We are also working to increase our phone line capacity and dispatch interoperability. We will limit calls to emergencies in these events and use our advanced metering infrastructure data to help identify issues.

We’re evaluating the potential purchase of a dedicated fuel tanker for the water utility and increasing our crosscrew training so that we can better leverage our staff. After the event, we learned that employees had trouble finding food because so much was closed. We heard stories about families bringing food to the plants for the employees. We need to build having food, such as meals ready to eat, into our emergency response plan. M

Mary Gugliuzza is the media relations and communications coordinator for the Fort Worth Water Department.

She can be reached at mary.gugliuzza@fortworthtexas.gov or (817) 392‑8253. municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE FORT WORTH WATER DEPARTMENT.

Mary Gugliuzza: We had over 15,000 emergency contacts from customers via phone, e-mail, and social media during this event. The call center was obviously overwhelmed. People were calling us not just to report main breaks but also to request emergency shutoffs when their private plumbing burst. Meter services staff responded to almost 1,400 calls during this event. We discovered that many people don’t know where their private shutoffs are located. Some people turned the water off at the meter on their own.

We did end up working with the city’s call center to take some of the calls, especially those related to the boil water notices. Our GIS team developed an interactive map that we put on our website, allowing customers to type in their addresses to see if they were included in the boil water notice area. It was helpful to have those interactive maps. We then ended up putting another interactive map online that showed all the main breaks and their status.

accessed some other water sources. The fire department had some tankers that it was able to use to distribute water. We have a MillerCoors brewery in our city that happens to be our largest water customer, and Coca-Cola has a distribution facility and bottling plant. Both provided us with bottled water. Hundreds of thousands of bottles and containers of water were distributed.

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Weathering Texas’s Winter Storm at the San Jacinto River Authority

SJRA employees deice water supply structures during the February storm.

T

he San Jacinto River Authority (SJRA) provides a range of raw water, drinking water, wastewater, and flood mitigation services to the region around Houston, Texas. During this February’s winter storm in Texas, the SJRA fared well: its backup generators, emergency readiness plans, and large inventory of replacement equipment allowed it to provide uninterrupted service to its customers and even to aid other agencies and facilities with drinking water. In this interview, SJRA General Manager Jace Houston and Operations Manager Jason Williams tell Municipal Water Leader about the agency and the reasons why it successfully weathered the storm.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Jason Williams: I started my career in water and wastewater infrastructure repair and replacement in Cleveland, Texas, in 1996 after I graduated from high school. In 1998, I began my operations career with the SJRA’s Woodlands division. I was promoted to the position of operations and maintenance manager for the SJRA Woodlands division in 2016 and to utility enterprise operations manager in 2020.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the SJRA. Jace Houston: There are probably a dozen river authorities in Texas. These are governmental entities created by our legislature in the first part of the 20th century to develop the municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SJRA.

Jace Houston: My undergraduate degree is in civil engineering, and I went to law school after that. I’m an attorney by trade and have been working in Texas my entire career. I worked at the state capitol, where I was exposed to legislative policy work. In 1997, I ended up in the water business. In Texas, groundwater is managed completely separately from surface water. I worked on the groundwater

side of our water universe for the first 10 years of my water career as general counsel for the Harris Galveston Subsidence District (HGSD). In 2007, a management position opened at the SJRA, which is on the surface water side of Texas water, and I switched to a management, leadership, and water policymaking position. I started as the deputy general manager in 2007, and in 2012, our previous general manager retired, and the board promoted me to his position.

ADVERTISEMENT water resources within certain river basins. River authorities cover large geographic areas—the SJRA is one of the smaller ones, because our river basin happens to be pretty small.

Some of the river authorities cover over 70 counties.

The core purpose of river authorities is to look 50–100 years into the future and determine how much water will be needed to meet future needs, whether industrial, municipal, agricultural, or mining related. If we determine that we don’t have enough water to meet those needs, then we identify the projects we will need to implement in order to secure it.

River authorities’ enabling statutes have long lists of different activities that we can undertake. However, we have to have customers who are willing to pay us to do those activities, because only one of the river authorities in Texas has tax authority. The rest of us have no ability to charge an ad valorem tax or property tax of any sort. We have to enter into contracts with customers to either sell them a product, such as water, or to provide a service for them, such as treating wastewater. Because of that, river authorities typically evolve to meet the needs of the customers in their basins.

The SJRA was created in 1937, so we’ve been around for over 75 years. We have five operating divisions. Our Highlands division is a raw water sales division that maintains infrastructure, pump stations, and canals to deliver and sell raw water to customers, most of whom are industrial. The Lake Conroe division built, operates, and maintains Lake Conroe, a water supply reservoir out of which a number of municipal and industrial customers purchase water. Our Woodlands division provides wholesale water and wastewater services to the 10 municipal utility districts (MUDs) that serve the community of The Woodlands, Texas, which has about 120,000 residents. Those 10 utility districts entered into contracts with us to build their regional wastewater treatment plants; to install their water wells, water towers, and water plants; and to be their wholesale water and wastewater provider. Our groundwater reduction plan division built a surface water treatment plant at Lake Conroe to treat water to drinking water standards and deliver it to customers within Montgomery County. Our final operating division is our flood management division. It was created in 2018 after Hurricane Harvey. We were directed by the governor of Texas to come up with flood mitigation projects and to work with local partners to find customers to pay to build those projects.

Municipal Water Leader: How large is your service area, and how many customers do you have?

Jace Houston: Our Woodlands division has 10 MUDs that are technically its customers, but it serves about 120,000 residents and businesses. We have 18–20 raw water customers, including power plants and the second-largest refinery in the country, ExxonMobil’s Baytown refinery.

Our surface water treatment plant at Lake Conroe has 80 customers, 7 of which receive treated surface water from the plant. Those include the City of Conroe, The Woodlands, municipalwaterleader.com

a number of MUDs, and a private co-op water utility. The seven large utilities that physically receive the surface water from the surface water treatment plant represent about 250,000 residential and commercial customers.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your experience during February winter storm and the effects that you saw on your infrastructure and services.

Jace Houston: An event like this affects each of our divisions a little differently. The surface water treatment plant is brand new, and most of its facilities were built from day 1 to be weather resistant. In the Houston region, our biggest threat is not ice storms; it’s hurricanes. We planned our systems to face prolonged power outages primarily because of hurricanes. That preparation is what got us through the ice storm.

There were also problems with freezing pipes and equipment. One of the largest threats was that with the power out, we couldn’t keep things turned on and pumping to keep water moving and prevent freezing. We were able to mitigate that risk because, for years, we’ve made capital investments in backup power. Our surface water treatment plant, our three wastewater treatment plants in The Woodlands, and most of our water plants in The Woodlands have built-in backup power, including natural gas generators and diesel generators, and some of our lift stations and remote operations have mobile generators.

To make those capital investments, you need to convince your customers to pay the rates necessary to afford them. Fortunately, our customers recognize the threat of hurricanes. Our region was without power for more than 10 days during Hurricane Ike in 2008. During a prolonged power outage, it’s bad enough not to be able run air conditioners, but being without drinking water would be worse. Because of that, our customers were willing to make those investments.

We had a plan in place for employees to be on duty for 24 hours once the storm began. We kept our employees housed on site when necessary so that they could take generators from location to location to keep systems operational.

Regarding the danger of freezing, a lot of our critical systems are within structures, and a lot of our exposed systems are large in diameter. The systems that are exposed to freezing temperatures are not 2‑inch PVC lines coming up the outside of a house; they are heavier-duty, larger-diameter pipes. We kept the water flowing and were able to avoid any major freezing problems. Where smaller pipes and valves did freeze, we had inventory on hand to replace things quickly.

Municipal Water Leader: How long were you without your normal power generation?

Jason Williams: In The Woodlands, we experienced 50 percent drops in power for periods of 4–6 hours in July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 23

ADVERTISEMENT one location and then in another. I don’t recall any time when we were completely in the dark in The Woodlands.

We always had one or two facilities with online power and the other three or four on generator power. We had to make sure that the ones that were using online power were reset, ready to go, and running as they should be.

The ones that were generating power were doing the best they could to keep up with demand to keep the water flowing and things running to avoid freezing issues.

I think the longest we were out in Lake Conroe was 10–12 hours. We would get power back for a couple of hours and then lose it again.

Jace Houston: The result was that our Woodlands utility never went down. Our customers never saw a loss of service, and we didn’t have to issue boil water notices. The surface water plant stayed operational throughout.

I got a call in the middle of the ice storm from our county office of emergency management asking whether we had a tap at the surface water treatment plant that could be used to fill up a truck. I made some calls and confirmed that we had the means to fill a truck at our surface water treatment plant. As soon as we confirmed that, the county office of emergency management put us on a state list of suppliers of potable water, and before we knew it, we had tanker trucks lined up at our gate to be filled with treated water to deliver all over the state, including to critical facilities like hospitals and dialysis centers. Some nearby utilities had their power back but still had boil water notices, so they were appreciative of the potable water we provided. We were filling trucks at the plant for several days.

Municipal Water Leader: To what extent did you see unusual changes in demand for your services?

Jace Houston: I remember our utility teams telling us that we were at summer demand levels. That was caused by a combination of broken pipes and people dripping or running faucets in order to keep pipes in their homes from freezing.

Jason Williams: During the first day or two of the freeze, demand was relatively low, but as soon as thawing started, we were at peak summertime usage. We were delivering more than 30 million gallons per day for about 2 days before it started to taper off. We were way above average for roughly 4 days.

Municipal Water Leader: What other emergency planning processes helped the agency respond to the storm?

24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

Jason Williams: The most important thing is that we had prepared for long power outages due to hurricanes.

We learned a lot during Hurricane Ike, and we’ve been preparing for the next Ike for many years now. You’re warned of a weather event roughly a week out, and at that point you start looking at your chemical and fuel stores and getting chemicals while you still have time. Most people don’t start to prep until 3 days out. We try to get ahead of the game. If the event misses us, that’s good; if it doesn’t, we’re prepared. We stock our offices with food for operators in case they can’t get home or have to be here for 24‑hour operations. We try to have comfortable facilities to sleep in, with bedding and cots.

Municipal Water Leader: What changes, if any, will you make to prepare for potential similar events in the future?

Jace Houston: One of the things we’ve talked about is mutual aid agreements. We were sending water out in this event. This was a statewide emergency, so there weren’t a lot of entities in a position to provide aid. Normally, our emergencies are regional, like a hurricane or wildfire. We have standing agreements with emergency service providers for things like pumps, pipes, and equipment, and we have mutual aid agreements with other water agencies in the state of Texas for equipment, including backhoes, bulldozers, dump trucks, and pumps. A lot of us have registered equipment in an inventory so that we can talk to each other and get what we need in a hurry. It will be a point of emphasis to improve and expand that system.

Jason Williams: We have to be prepared for everything.

Being prepared for hurricanes helped us a ton. We also need to plan for extreme cold weather events, such as the February storm. We need to beef up our cold weather gear for our employees in the field. We do have cold weather gear, but not for 8ºF at midnight. M

Jace Houston is the general manager of the San Jacinto River Authority. He can be contacted at jhouston@sjra.net.

Jason Williams is the operations manager of the San Jacinto River Authority. He can be contacted at jwilliams@sjra.net.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SJRA.

Jace Houston: For one, we had an inventory of parts we knew we were going to need in an emergency. When the roads are frozen over, you can’t get in the truck and drive to the parts store and get what you need. Making the investment of time and money to have things on hand

was a big deal. Also, we put a lot of emphasis on ongoing inspection and maintenance.

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How the Gulf Coast Water Authority Performed Above 100 Percent Capacity During the February Storm

T

he Gulf Coast Water Authority (GCWA), headquartered in Texas City, Texas, provides wholesale water to Brazoria, Fort Bend, and Galveston Counties. During this February’s winter storm, the GCWA never lost power and operated at more than 100 percent of its rated capacity. In this interview, Jake Hollingsworth, the GCWA’s chief of staff, tells us about how the agency managed this impressive feat.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Jake Hollingsworth: I’m the chief of staff for the GCWA. I’m responsible for strategic planning and ensuring the organization stays on mission to reliably deliver water to our customers. Since coming to the GCWA in 2016, I have served as the strategy and performance manager and as the water plant manager. Prior to that, I was the assistant director of utilities for Bay County Utilities in Florida. There, I was responsible for a 60‑million-gallon-a-day (MGD) surface water plant as well as the distribution system and the wastewater system. I got into the water business after college and haven’t looked back. I really like the water industry—I feel like there’s always something new to learn.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the GCWA. Jake Hollingsworth: The GCWA was established in 1965 by the Texas Legislature to deliver wholesale water to industrial, agricultural, and municipal users in Brazoria, Galveston, and Fort Bend counties. As a wholesaler, we do not provide directly to households. Our customers are the 13 municipalities we provide with drinking water. Through them, we serve about 200,000 people. Overall, we can deliver up to 200 MGD of water from the Brazos River to support agriculture, industries, and municipalities.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the GCWA’s experience with the February winter storm and the effects it had on your infrastructure and services.

28 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

were actually pumping more water than we were contracted for. Our plant is rated at 57 MGD, but our peak flow during the storm was at least 62 MGD at moments.

Winter is when we do a lot of plant maintenance, and one of the biggest challenges was that at the beginning of the event, one of our clarifiers was out of service for painting, coating, and the kind of maintenance we do every 4–5 years. That one clarifier accounts for 30 percent of our plant capacity by itself. We called our operations personnel and the contractors we had working on that job at 2:30 a.m., and within 45 minutes, they were there pulling all their equipment out. That job normally takes days to do correctly, but we put that clarifier back in operation within 10 hours of that phone call. Our personnel and contractors did an immense amount of work in some really bad weather conditions. Our canal division personnel came and helped the water plant operators, maintenance crew, and contractors get it all done. Getting the clarifier running in 10 hours was a big deal. It speaks volumes about the teamwork mentality that we have in our organization. municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE GCWA.

Jake Hollingsworth: We did not have any critical failures due to freezing in our plant system. There was nothing that affected our ability to produce safe drinking water. None of the pipes inside our buildings burst, just a few water supply lines to chemical tanks that are used for flushing. That’s a credit to our operations staff, who are the best in the business.

We were 100 percent operational the entire time. Sometimes, we were more than 100 percent operational, meaning that we

A low lift leak on an ancillary raw water line.

ADVERTISEMENT Municipal Water Leader: Did you lose your normal power supply?

Jake Hollingsworth: We never lost power, thanks to a public-private partnership with a company called Enchanted Rock. It owns a bank of generators on our site, and we contract with it to provide power to us. It had those generators running the entire time. Not only was it supplying us with power, but it had the ability to produce excess generating capacity that fed back into the state grid.

After Hurricane Ike in 2008, the biggest problem we had was loss of power and getting the plant back up. That event is what inspired us to establish that partnership and put in those generators.

Municipal Water Leader: During the storm, did you see unusual changes in water demand?

Jake Hollingsworth: Water demand was at the highest level the plant has ever seen. Our customers were pulling more than their contract quantities pretty much across the board.

It took a lot of effort and communication to make sure that we were sending water where it was most needed.

Municipal Water Leader: What interaction did you have with other agencies during the storm event?

Jake Hollingsworth: Our operations personnel were in constant communication with our 13 municipal customers, telling them the status of the plant and sending water to parts of the system with the most need. We were also providing some updates to the public via Facebook and communicating with local newspapers to make sure that the right information was getting out. Thanks to this work, the public knew that our water plant was still operating at 100 percent capacity.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about your emergency preparedness work and how it helped you in this situation?

Jake Hollingsworth: A crisis like the one we had in February puts a big strain on the system. The entire state of Texas freezing is something extremely unusual. Fortunately, we do massive amounts of preparation and planning. The operational staff at our water treatment plant and elsewhere in our organization do a phenomenal job of training, making sure they’re ready for every circumstance. We train to be able to run our plant manually, without our computer system. We do extensive emergency response planning, including tabletop exercises and lots of what-if scenarios at the water plant.

We learned a lot from the freezes we experienced from 2018 to 2020. We have heat tanks and heat lamps on our critical infrastructure. At the start of each winter season, the staff carry out a freeze protection check, a practice municipalwaterleader.com

we established from experience to protect our assets. We make sure all the heat tracing and taping protections are plugged in and functional. We put in pipe insulation and wrap exposed pipe, heat components, valves, and anything else that needs to be protected from freezing. That prior planning is why we kept ourselves operational when a lot of people did not.

Municipal Water Leader: What changes might you make to your emergency preparedness measures to prepare for similar events in the future?

Jake Hollingsworth: Historically, we have not spent a lot of time considering how to treat a freeze event. We have a massive hurricane preparedness plan that we’ve gone over again and over again. We are now thinking we need to do the same thing for freeze events. We need to start using a National Incident Management System approach and making sure that 3 days out from the event, we’re starting to call and prepare our rideout crew—the group that stays at the plant until the event has subsided. We did not do that in this case because we had never dealt with a freeze that lasted as long as this one. We’ve learned that we have to staff our plant the same way during a freeze that we do during a hurricane event. We don’t want to have to worry about people going back and forth from home to work. We want to make sure that they’re safe. We also want to make sure that we’re not overworking people. We don’t want people working 16‑hour shifts.

Municipal Water Leader: Are there any infrastructure changes that you may want to make in response to this event?

Jake Hollingsworth: We are looking into whether we need microgrids with electrical generation elsewhere. We don’t have anything specific in the plans at the moment. We didn’t lose power at all, so we don’t foresee the need to make huge changes. We just need to focus on what we’re doing well.

Municipal Water Leader: Is there anything you would like to add?

Jake Hollingsworth: Our employees did a wonderful job. Like a lot of people in the area, they weren’t just dealing with problems at work. They were dealing with issues in their homes, such as bursting pipes. I can’t give them enough credit for dealing with all that and doing the wonderful job they did. M Jake Hollingsworth is the chief of staff at the Gulf Coast Water Authority. He can be contacted at jhollingsworth@gcwater.org.

July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

| 29

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How RACI’s Casing Spacers Help Municipalities Protect Their Pipes

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32 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | July/August 2021

an old, sleepy business. We truly feel we are now poised to have a strong presence across the United States and Mexico and aim to continue to service our valued clients for many years to come.

RACI casing spacers.

Municipal Water Leader: Who are RACI’s customers?

Brad Mehalko: On the water and sewer side, our customer base includes but is not limited to municipalities, counties, boring and construction contractors, installers, wholesalers, and engineering groups. Some of the applications we commonly see are dual-containment drainage projects for airports and large car lots and dual-containment systems and oil and gas applications for transmission and distribution pipelines. RACI’s environmentally friendly, pure high-density polyethylene (HDPE) casing spacer provides an exact and educated solution for everything from everyday applications to the most challenging of jobs. Over the course of 60 years of executing projects in the field, we have had zero reported failures—zero!

Josef Reschreiter: Our customers also include the engineering departments of large municipalities, which use our products for municipal water and sewer lines, from those with diameters of 2, 4, or 6 inches all the way up to those of 140 inches. Our product can go into sewer lines, storm drains, dual containment applications (e.g., airport drainage municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF RACI.

nstalling and ensuring the longevity of pipes is a fundamental challenge for municipal water entities. RACI’s casing spacers allow pipes to be installed and secured in place with zero metal bolts, clamps, or other parts that will inevitably fail, thus increasing pipe longevity and allowing for easier installation.

In this interview, Josef Reschreiter of RACI and Brad Mehalko of Public Works Products, Inc. (PWP), tell Municipal Water Leader about the advantages of RACI spacers and how the company is seeking to expand its reach across North America.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Josef Reschreiter: RACI started producing spacers in the 1960s and is now a global company. I started working in the distribution of RACI spacers about 31 years ago, focusing on the North and South American markets. We’ve since developed specific product lines for the U.S. market.

We can accommodate all the different casing sizes, pipe diameters, and pipe types, which has been well received by our valued customers. I have been closely working with PWP since 1994, and it has been a long and rewarding journey.

Over the years, we’ve developed strong friendships and relationships, and everything we do is built on mutual trust.

Our word is our bond. In 2020, we had fresh blood come to PWP when Scott Ferguson and Brad Mehalko purchased the company and took over its management. They are doing an amazing job expanding to various different parts of the United States that had not been covered efficiently until now.

Brad Mehalko: My story is a little different than Josef ’s. I grew up in southern Alberta, Canada, and had the privilege of playing professional hockey until the age of 32, which afforded me the opportunity to live and work all over the United States, Norway, Finland, and Germany. When I decided to hang up my skates, I transitioned into the energy sector and held various positions in the oil and gas industry over 12 years. In late 2020, I was presented with the amazing business opportunity of joining a group of ambitious, like-minded individuals to purchase PWP, which was then known as Public Works Marketing. PWP has been the exclusive master distributor of RACI casing spacers for 27 years and has built a great book of business over the years. Every day, we learn more about the business and see the value of the great connections that have been forged over 27 years of operations. We have a great working and personal relationship with Josef and RACI and are still the exclusive master distributor of RACI casing spacers in the United States and Mexico. Since the purchase, we have done some rebranding, made necessary changes, and freshened up

ADVERTISEMENT applications), and anywhere else there is a pipe inside a pipe or a cased crossing. That’s where our product is best in class. We also supply the oil and gas market, where we are seen as a pipeline safety product for transmission and distribution lines.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the installation process.

Josef Reschreiter: The installation process is modern, safe, and worry free. The installer simply joins the individual spacer segments together to complete the spacer ring or band. Each spacer has a male and a female toothed end that simply ratchet together. That simplicity is one of the principles of the RACI spacer. There are no bolts to attach and no wedges or additional parts that can be dropped or lost or that can break or fail. RACI spacers are designed to outlast the lifespan of the pipe.

Municipal Water Leader: What is distinctive about RACI’s casing spacers?

PHOTOS COURTESY OF RACI AND PWP.

Josef Reschreiter: To ensure that we have protection all around the carrier pipe, we specify one projection for every inch of pipe diameter. It is important to note that longer casings made by boring equipment are not necessarily always straight and can even go up and down or snake left and right. When the carrier pipe is inserted, RACI spacers not only protect the bottom of the pipe, but also the sides and the top, as there can be contact with the casing all around the pipe during installation. In many installations, the carrier pipe also tends to slowly rotate during insertion, so it is imperative to have equal protection around all 360 degrees of the pipe’s diameter, with at least one projection for every inch of pipe diameter.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the engineering support that RACI provides.

Josef Reschreiter: On average, every 20th inquiry includes some need for engineering support. We have a central engineering office, and we have an engineering team that works with the specifiers to give them as much support as they need to specify the casing and carrier size and the safe load-carrying capacity of the RACI casing spacer so that they can use them confidently and have the most costeffective installation.

Each individual model and type of RACI spacer is specified with exact load-carrying capacities, based on actual testing and long-term exposure. Our RACI brochure includes all the specifications and load-carrying data, and when we come across specific engineering needs or concerns, we can help address any questions or concerns with the backing of our dedicated engineering team. This will ensure that the installation is done per specification municipalwaterleader.com

with a successful outcome. We will provide engineering drawings and make recommendations for the type of spacer, the runner heights, and the installation criteria, giving the installers confidence and peace of mind.

In the last couple of months, one of our clients was going to put a carrier pipe into a large-diameter steel casing. The client wanted to run an additional pipe on top of the carrier pipe along with a fiber-optic cable. We had our engineers take a look at it, and we came up with the solution of using a slightly taller spacer and placing the conduit for the fiber-optic cable inside the runners, allowing the client to significantly reduce its overall steel casing size, resulting in major cost savings. In fact, the savings are greater than the total cost of the spacers. Our engineering expertise can significantly improve a project or reduce costs. Engineering companies and municipalities love us because we can provide all the necessary details.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about PWP’s expansion of its warehousing capacity.

Brad Mehalko: We have the ability to effectively service all of the United States and Mexico at this point, but we understand that with significant growth in sales comes the need for a larger footprint. Ideally, we will grow into warehouses on the West and East Coasts of the United States, complementing our current Dallas, Texas, headquarters and ensuring we efficiently and effectively maintain and service the growing needs of our clients. We are actively seeking qualified sales teams across the United States that have a strong desire to be a part of our growth.

Josef Reschreiter: Since new management has come to PWP, we’ve already seen significant increases in sales volumes and inquiries. However, in order to meet that growth, there has to be more inventory to ensure that we can continue PWP’s next-day or 2‑day shipment policy and its high quality of service in all corners of the United States. M

Josef Reschreiter is the president and CEO of RACI Spacers North America, Inc.

Brad Mehalko is the vice president and coowner of Public Works Products, Inc. He can be reached at sales@pwp-co.com or (214) 340‑4226. For more about PWP, visit www.publicworksproducts.com.

July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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A&W MAINTENANCE LABORER COATING TECHNICIAN Location: Atlanta, Georgia Deadline: Open until filled RESPONSIBILITIES: +S urface preparation of the area in which epoxy will be applied. +P erform functions of a laborer as required. +S andblast to remove debris from metal. +O perate electric and hand tools. +O perate a high-PSI pressure washer and spray gun. +K eep tools, equipment, and work area clean.

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July/August 2021 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Upcoming Events July 6–8 Irrigation Australia, Conference and Exhibition, Sydney, Australia July 6–12 International Commission on Irrigation and Drainage, 24th Congress & 71st International Executive Council Meeting, Sydney, Australia July 9–12 National Association of Counties, Annual Conference and Expo, Prince George’s County, MD, and virtual July 12–13 North Dakota Water Resource Districts Association, Summer Meeting and North Dakota Water Education Foundation Executive Briefing, Dickinson, ND July 13–15 North Dakota Water Users Association, Summer Meeting, Grand Forks, ND July 14 North Dakota Rural Water Systems Association, Annual Meeting and Summer Leadership Retreat, Medora, ND July 19–21 American Water Resources Association, Virtual Summer Conference: Connecting Land and Water for Healthy Communities (virtual) July 27–29 The Partnership for Safe Water and the California-Nevada Section of the American Water Works Association, 25th Anniversary Virtual Optimization Conference (virtual) August 1–4 International Water Association, 10th Membrane Technology Conference and Exhibition for Water and Wastewater Treatment and Reuse, St. Louis, MO August 3–5 National Conference of State Legislatures, Legislative Policy Base Camp (virtual) August 9–11 8th International Conference on Flood Management, Iowa City, IA August 10–12 National Water Resources Association, Western Water Tour of the Columbia Basin, Portland, OR August 18 The California-Nevada Section of the American Water Works Association, Water Education Seminar (virtual) August 24–26 Colorado Water Congress, Summer Conference, Steamboat Springs, CO September 13–16 National Rural Water Association, WaterPro Conference, Milwaukee, WI September 14 Husker Harvest Days, Grand Island, NE September 21–23 Hydrovision International, Spokane, WA September 22–29 National Drilling Association, Convention, Charlotte, NC September 26–28 Nebraska Association of Resources Districts, Natural Resources Districts Annual Conference, Kearney, NE September 28–30 The Water Council, Alliance for Water Stewardship Training (virtual) September TBD Agribusiness & Water Council of Arizona, Annual Meeting and Water Conference, TBD October 3–6 Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, Executive Management Conference, Denver, CO October 5–9 Water Environment Federation, WEFTEC, Chicago, IL, and virtual October 13–15 National Association of Counties, Western Interstate Region Conference, Salt Lake County, UT October 19–21 The California-Nevada Section of the American Water Works Association, Annual Fall Conference (virtual) October 29 Agribusiness & Water Council of Arizona, H2Open Golf Tournament, Casa Grande, AZ

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