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

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

Record-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.

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.

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

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

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 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 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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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.

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.

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.