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