IMS Annual Conference 2019

Treating wastewater effluent to meet drinking water standards for direct distribution to the public (direct potable reuse, DPR) is growing in the US. The driving forces for DPR include the increased value of water, finite water supply, sustained droughts, and population growth. The current challenges associated with DPR are not in the treatment but in the public outreach and regulatory acceptance.
The City of South Jordan is pursuing DPR as a reliable, high-quality, drought-tolerant supply to help meet potable demands of their future customers. The first step for South Jordan's DPR journey is a 20-gpm demonstration facility located at the Jordan Basin Water Reclamation Facility. This facility will provide critical process performance data for the proposed, non-RO treatment train. More importantly, it will be a showcase facility available for public tours and tasting, and will provide years of operational confidence to City officials, regulators, and the public.
We will present case studies of existing DPR facilities in other states, discuss South Jordan's proposed process train and how it is impacted by the upstream wastewater treatment process, the DPR demonstration facility, and an overview of the capital and O&M costs of a future full scale facility.

Water reuse is becoming an increasingly vital aspect of water management in the western states. This presentation will cover the basics of water reuse, including the technology and the policy behind it, and how the AWWA’s recently released national standard fits in.

Due to the chemicals stored and injected at fluoridation facilities and the critical need of preventing fluoride overfeed in drinking water systems, special considerations must be included when designing, operating or inspecting fluoridation facilities. This presentation will cover Utah's design and construction requirements and important lessons learned from past incidents related to fluoridation facilities.

The results of UCMR-3 showed PFAS being found coast to coast in groundwater and some surface waters, and that it was often linked to industrial manufacturing or Class B firefighting foam usage. Aggressive provisional health advisories have been set by EPA for PFOA and PFOS, and a new action plan was released in February 2019. There has been a flurry of activity by individual states and industry to help better inform the public and find better technologies to handle this new issue. The presentation will give an update about some of the new/modified treatment technologies being employed for PFAS, present lessons learned from installed projects, and give an update about the regulatory environment for PFAS.

The City of West Jordan has implemented a system wide replacement of their Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system in a three phased approach. Phase I consisted of developing a master plan that captured the City’s vision, defined the approach, identified features and capabilities of the City’s existing SCADA system, outlined and planned near-term improvements, and the analysis and selection of a new Human Interface Software (HMI). Phase II included the HMI architecture design, development of control system standards, and design of the remote site controls and telemetry to monitor and control reservoirs, valves, meters, and pumps within the City’s water system. During Phase II construction documents were created for the replacement of the SCADA system, the project was bid, and a contractor was selected. In Phase III the selected contractor is constructing and installing the SCADA system control panels and the HMI software is being programmed to control the remote facility sites. The SCADA system components at each facility site will be replaced over the next 6 months. The new system will be commissioned in phases during this time, with project completion anticipated in November of 2019.

In 2016, the Salt Lake City Department of Public Utilities (DPU) identified the need to increase the project delivery capacity of the organization without significantly increasing the number of DPU staff or operating costs. DPU retained Jacobs/CH2M Hill Engineering to provide Program Management Services to expedite the delivery through staff augmentation, process improvements, and program management systems implementation.
To accelerate project delivery and bring increased visibility, and tracking, DPU has automated key project delivery business processes (e.g. Capital Planning, Consultant Invoices, Submittals, and RFIs). In addition to the process automation, project management practices, policies and other tools have been improved to meet the increased project delivery capacity of the organization.
MS-SharePoint is used as the overarching system for managing all project documents and associated business process information. Each capital project has its own site where the automation is performed, logs are monitored, and all project documentation is stored. Each site is utilized by DPU staff, design consultants and construction contractors. The system also includes personalized pages for executives to manage the approvals for project related actions. Also, part of the system is the “Performance Portal”, integrated with Primavera 6, which tracks schedule and cost information for each of DPU’s projects.

Carollo's Blue Plan-it® tool helps utilities manage complex, interconnected water and wastewater infrastructure by evaluating and optimizing complex planning alternatives, confirming design concepts based on operational simulations, training operators, and optimizing operating facilities.

We used Blue Plan-it® to assist with Houston's Northeast Water Purification Plant (NEWPP) Expansion Project. This $1.75B project expands the existing 80-mgd NEWPP to 400 mgd using conventional treatment, intermediate ozone, biological filtration, and mechanical dewatering. The raw water source is challenging: major storm events produce rapidly changing conditions that can drop alkalinity to 10 mg/L, raise turbidity to 250 NTU, raise TOC to 20 mg/L, and require alum doses up to 220 mg/L. These challenges demand high reliability and operational flexibility, which also increases complexity.

This presentation will highlight how we used a Blue Plan-it® operational model to simplify the complexity for design confirmation and operator training by:
1. Demonstrating how plant operations respond to rapidly changing raw water quality, including impact of chemical dosing, finished water stability, and O&M cost
2. Highlighting the operational impacts (truck traffic) of high turbidity events and resulting high solids loading (700,000 lb/day)
3. Clarifying operational strategies to take advantage of built-in redundancy when different trains are out of service.