Montgomery County Water Services
Dayton, Ohio
Montgomery County Water Services (MCWS) is a regional water and sewer provider
with 11 water booster stations, 36 sewage lift stations, three equalization basins, and two
regional WWTPs (20 MGD and 13 MGD). MCWS provides an average 26 MGD
drinking water to 250,000 people. All drinking water is purchased from the City of
Dayton, OH. MCWS staff is comprised of 242 persons.
Responding to operational alarms and work requests at remote water and sanitary pump
stations often requires sending two people—one mechanic and one electrician. This often
creates unnecessary overtime as the corrective action usually requires either mechanical
or electrical repair—not both. In 2007, we began to study how to maintain core operation
and maintenance (O&M) responsibilities, save labor costs, provide improved mechanical
and electrical maintenance support using existing staff, and to develop better-skilled
maintenance employees. The ability to improve maintenance skills within the two
WWTPs was also examined.
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Posted: May 20th, 2011 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Stormwater, Waste Water Treatment, Water Treatment | Tags: Improved Employee Morale, Improved Maintenance, Improved Plant Reliability, Increased Equipment Service Life, Lobor Cost Savings, O&M Savings | No Comments »
The Water Environment Research Foundation’s (WERF) ongoing research program defines
strategic asset management (SAM) practices and develops tools and techniques that help utilities
implement asset management (AM) programs. EMA and partnering organizations lead this
research, which expands WERF and WaterRF’s Sustainable Infrastructure Management Program
Learning Environment (SIMPLE) knowledge base for AM in four “tracks”: (1) Public
Communication, (2) Benchmarking/Case Studies, (3) Decision/Analysis Implementation
Guidance, and (4) Remaining Asset Life. Track 2 identifies utilities’ leading AM practices and
develops utility examples, helping other utilities learn how to implement SAM. A utilities survey
identified opportunity areas for SAM and gaps for improvement. These leading practices
(validated through site visits and a leading practices research forum conducted in June 2010) can
help utilities optimize asset life-cycle cost in: Accounting and Costing, Business Risk
Management, Organization and People, Maintenance, Secondary Data and Knowledge, and
Strategic Asset Planning and Asset Management plans.
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Posted: May 20th, 2011 | Filed under: Stormwater, Waste Water Treatment, Water Treatment | Tags: Best Practices, Business Risk Management, Improved Communication, Improved Maintenance, Improved Plant Organization, Optimize Life-Cycle Cost, Plant Optimization, Strategic Asset Planning | No Comments »
Pinellas County Utilities William E. Dunn Water Reclamation Facility
Palm Harbor, Florida
Automated control of a facility is often one of the principal improvements desired to ease demands placed on operators. Plant personnel are required to maintain processes within governed parameters that in conjunction with increasingly smaller staff numbers can present challenges. One challenge encountered frequently with plant personnel is the aversion to change and use of new technologies. This problem was clearly evident in the early stages of construction where formally manually operated processes were switched back into manual control after being fully automated and switched into auto mode. This issue was due mainly to thoughts that “people” jobs were being replaced with computers. Pinellas County constantly monitors the condition of the plants and the staff’s abilities to maintain the condition. The installation of a fully automated system not only is a valuable tool in maintaining control over the processes it allows the Operator to view the entire plant processes. The result is time savings, more efficient use of chemicals and other consumables, and improved maintenance capabilities. The use of the new automated system employed for this project has resulted in the following new abilities of plant operators:
• Through the use of trend charting provided by the Programmable Logic Controller (PLC),
• What/If scenarios can be presented to determine possible outcomes, maximize plant performance, and trouble shoot processes.
• Polymer usage versus sludge feed rates can be optimized to provide cost benefits.
• Operators were provided handheld Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) which allowed both monitoring and operating the entire plant from any point in the facility.
• During second and third shifts this tool has allowed operators to respond to emergencies with greater efficiency. Source: WEFTEC 2009 Proceedings
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Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Waste Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Faster Emergency Response, Improved Maintenance, Improved Troubleshooting, Maximized Plant Performance, Plant Optimization, Time Savings | No Comments »
Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility
Washington, DC
“We agree that automation works at other locations, it just won’t work here.” This was the sentiment predicting the success of the automatic process control at the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority’s (WASA) 370 MGD Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment facility during the start of the Process Control System (PCS) automation program. This pessimism was broadly believed because of previous automation disappointments that spanned from the 1970s up until the late 1990s. Much has changed since that statement was made more than a decade ago, and this paper lists the challenges that the project faced and how they were successfully overcome to make this implementation successful and convert the naysayers into champions of the PCS. Source: WEFTEC 2009 Proceedings
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Posted: August 27th, 2010 | Filed under: 100K-500K, Waste Water Treatment | Tags: Cost Savings, Faster Emergency Response, Improved Maintenance, Improved Troubleshooting, Maximized Plant Performance, Plant Optimization, Time Savings | No Comments »