City Contracts for Wastewater Lift Station Monitoring Service

J-U-B Engineers, an Idaho civil engineering firm, has reached a three-year agreement with the City of Pocatello, Idaho, to monitor operational parameters for the city's 22 wastewater lift stations. JUB is implementing a service developed by Insightek, Inc., an Idaho-based technology company specializing in remote resource monitoring systems and services.

The J-U-B/Insightek service will replace sporadic manual inspection of the lift stations with real-time monitoring that can predict major failure before problems appear.

"In the past we have used systems based on SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) technology," said J-U-B Engineers president Jim Coleman. "The advantage of Insightek's service is that it provides a monitoring approach that can be delivered anytime, anywhere via the Internet, and can provide predictive analysis as well as provide alerts when something goes wrong."

"Other systems lack expert software that creates knowledge via diagnostic analysis and reporting," said Kevin Rowland, vice-president of sales and marketing for Insightek. "With Insightek's technology, not only can past events be followed, but future events can be predicted - preventing expensive down time and repair situations."

The City of Pocatello has been evaluating the technology on a small scale, test basis. The city was sufficiently impressed with the technology's potential to sign an agreement for full implementation with J-U-B, making it the first full-scale commercial application of the service.

"We can remotely monitor the lift stations and get a clear indication before we leave the shop as to what potential problems may occur," said Todd McCarroll, a City of Pocatello Water Pollution Control Depart ment technician. "This will allow us to better utilize the time of the department staff."

J-U-B sees wide-spread potential for the monitoring technology.

"I think small and medium-sized cities in particular will benefit enormously from this service," said Coleman. "Any computer can be used for access, and engineers can constantly monitor each lift station's status and use the resulting data for future planning. It will help project the life of the systems more accurately while saving man hours in inspection time for city public works."

Honolulu Selects New GIS & EAM/CMMS System

Synergen, Inc., a provider of Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) and Computerized Maintenance Management (CMMS) software, has been selected by the City and County of Honolulu to provides its software to manage the Department of Environmental Services' (ENV) wastewater collection, maintenance, treatment and disposal systems on the island of Oahu.

Honolulu's island-wide system processes more than 41 billion gallons of wastewater annually via 65 wastewater pump stations, eight wastewater treatment plants, four preliminary treatment facilities and 1900 miles of sewer lines.

"We are confident the Synergen Series will put us on the cutting edge of wastewater management technology," said Kenneth Sprague, the City's Environmental Services Director. "It will also enable us to meet our commitment to the federal Environmental Protection Agency in implementing our 20-year sewer rehabilitation plan. Our success depends upon effectively maintaining, monitoring, evaluating current operations and planning future projects for our wastewater system. "

The Synergen Series™ will be integrated with the city's Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) process control system, as well as its existing Geographic Information System (GIS) software, which is used to spatially map the city's extensive sewer networks. The sewer system consists of over 283,600 mainline arcs and approximately 282,140 nodes or manholes, and is tracked by the city's ESRI ArcInfo™-based GIS system. The city will take advantage of Synergen's recently released GIS technology option, which was a critical decision factor in the selection of the system, according to the city's project manager, Ivy Kawakami, who will oversee the implementation.

The software addresses all aspects of operations including: asset management and maintenance; materials management, purchasing, inventory, and contract management; operational accounting; timekeeping, reporting and analysis; project tracking; compliance tracking; and document management. It takes advantage of Oracle's Developer technology and operates in the client-server, internet, intranet, and extranet environments.

Florida District Plans Expansion

Englewood Water District of Englewood, Fla., recently awarded USFilter a $3.5 million contract to expand its current wastewater treatment facility, originally installed by USFilter's Davis Products.

The company will supply a 1 mgd extended aeration/nitrification process treatment plant to complement the existing 1.2 mgd facility. The expansion will also incorporate a new 2.2 mgd Gravisand™ XCELL™ traveling bridge filter.

In addition, an existing concrete treatment plant will be retrofitted into an influent wetwell and surge tank, complete with static screening. The expansion construction is targeted to begin in February 2001.

Englewood Water District oversees the operation and maintenance of the water and wastewater services in Englewood and the surrounding area. The District also provides wastewater collection and treatment for its water customers connected to the sanitary sewer system.