Agency Program Setup and Execution

The California Safe Drinking Water code, the California General Order Waste Discharge Requirements, and the federal National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permits all require a programmatic approach to utility management. This programmatic approach applies to agencies in water, wastewater, and stormwater. 

Typically, agencies get into trouble (running into CWA lawsuits after raw sewage SSOs or getting a contaminated water distribution system) when they are caught in the bind of too many jobs for too few personnel.

EEI provides a cafeteria-style set of services, from turnkey design and implementation to help with a single issue, and we work from concept to execution.

  • Municipal code review for currency, compliance, and conflicts

  • Program Plan development, from inception to final implementation phases

  • Work planning to predict resource needs and ease outsourcing

  • Program software selection to enable remote inspection data input and Food Service Establishment (FSE) mailings, if needed

  • Communications planning to maximize public outreach effectiveness

TURNKEY MANAGEMENT

Agencies often cannot justify hiring new personnel to administer a program like FOG control or Force Main Condition Assessment, and staff turnover can interrupt the thread of agency intention. EEI works with in-house champions to manage and support these programs in a variety of ways. We provide a dedicated, knowledgeable staff to perform administrative tasks to keep agency systems in compliance and extend the lifespan of their systems. If your agency could use a plan, needs analytical support, or a consistent, in-house presence to build a program, let us know. We at EEI enjoy getting to know you and your systems in this way and have the experience and perspective that is often critical to developing community support.

Hydraulic modeling

Hydraulic modeling gives agencies the capacity to evaluate system behavior under extremes, to perform failure consequence assessments, assess water quality developments and try solutions, project capital projects needs, and detect abnormal performance that indicates failure or maladjustment. We have worked with models from the dawn of the technology through the range of current, GIS-driven models.

Model to target a specific problem

Hydraulic models have the flexibility to incorporate whole-system behaviors and dynamics, but often, we need a solution to a specific system element issue. EEI works with agencies flexibly, minimizing the scope and effort to address what is needed and what results are useful.

Condition assessment practices to move to action

Condition assessment - a process of evaluating the condition and remaining service life available to a facility - can reveal a problem before it becomes a failure (or for critical facilities, an emergency). When utility staff can’t access or see the facility, condition assessment is particularly difficult, and it’s often left out of water and wastewater system operation and maintenance projects. Consequently, underground pressure pipe deterioration represents the biggest liability headache for water and wastewater agencies and the companies insuring them.

Force mains are expensive to construct, critical to collection system and treatment operations, tend to include materials and equipment not found anywhere else in collection systems, and tend to fail spectacularly. It’s one of the reasons insurance pools are keen to improve their agency clients’ work with these facilities: their failures can be disastrous for an agency’s priorities and for the community they serve.

Water mains often serve to failure, and failures on high-consequence water mains tend to capture headlines. Do you remember the last water main that excavated an intersection in a few minutes, flooded nearby businesses, and wiped out service for adjacent utilities? Who doesn’t? It’s hard to forget.

What to do?

Ewers Engineering implements a risk-based, systematic, and vendor-agnostic approach to condition assessment to minimize its impact on agency resources while getting the information needed to move to action. We set up programs, address specific projects, and work as staff extension to

  • Extend pipeline longevity by minimizing lifespan-shortening factors like hydrogen sulfide entrapment, transient pressure events, and out-of-range velocity and pressure operations

  • Build staff understanding and preparedness with Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) integration and work planning

  • Prioritize improvements to best serve the agency's customers by addressing the highest-risk elements first

  • Demonstrate management excellence to bolster public support and reassure regulators by complying with current Waste Discharge Requirements (WDRs)

  • Improve system design with better equipment and supplier interfaces (particularly for air vacuum valves) and hydraulics-based system troubleshooting

  • Integrate O&M with engineering by working both sides of the house into projects and showing how each impacts the other, requiring coordination

For those pipelines that cannot run to failure, we provide a process that is custom-fit to your pipelines and operations. Contact us to discuss your agency’s process and how we can help you achieve your objectives.

Emergency Response Planning that works

We develop emergency response planning documents that implement NIMS/SEMS and standards, are system-specific, and ease responsiveness. EEI has completed emergency response documents for special districts and municipalities for water systems to comply with the 2018 America’s Water Infrastructure Act. Our core philosophy: Create action-oriented documentation so that the last O&M hire can successfully respond to emergencies at 2 a.m.

Transparent decision-making for the hard stuff

Recently, we got a great question from a maintenance supervisor: Should maintenance (including condition assessment) be skipped in favor of simply replacing a pipeline? The prospect of spending tens of thousands of dollars in maintenance on a pipeline that is well into its service life for much of its length is daunting. So is raising millions of dollars to replace the line and manage its replacement.

The same questions could then be posed for all large capital assets: “Why keep them? When should they just be replaced?”

The decision depends on multiple, often competing objectives. One approach (a common one) is to let the loudest, most intrusive matter get the resources, then clean up when necessary. That’s the approach that yields 20-MG sewage spills into a creek and storage tank ruptures. We advocate and support a different approach to difficult decisions. It’s based on some simple principles:

  • Make decisions repeatable and transparent. Establish the bases for decisions (define objectives and the metrics that support them), then collect and document the supporting information involved. If there’s a question about the decision, be able to roll back through the process quickly and efficiently. It helps with boards of directors, casual conversations with customers, and a good night’s sleep.

  • Integrate risk assessment. Though we humans are notoriously poor at off-the-cuff risk assessment, structured and standardized risk assessments translated into dollars lost work very well. Here at EEI, we’ve independently calculated the cost of people in one town sickening from water storage tank contamination, and the results are incredibly clarifying for the agency. Risk assessment is the reigning champion of decision-making tools - though it must be done well.

  • Adopt standards from other fields when needed. In building one decision support system for an agency, we adopted the O&M valuation practices from private plant operations practices. Their factory operations standards and rules of thumb include O&M levels necessary for minimum future operations and for exiting the business. We used this to show the agency they were investing in their plant O&M as if they were planning on leaving the business soon. And they increased their O&M funding as a result.

Ewers Engineering makes the process easy for our clients. We develop detailed, realistic failure risk models that establish a clear path to understanding the benefit of complex capital assets throughout their life cycles. Our work develops decision support tools that provide repeatable, transparent, flexible, and systematic bases for decision-making around large capital asset life cycle investments. Their mathematical models allows us to provide graphics for presentation for risks, urgency, consequences, benefits, and failure likelihoods in maps, graphs, and logic diagrams for easy communication with boards of directors with a range of technical expertise.

They are oriented to answer these deceptively simple questions:

  • When should a pipeline asset be removed from service?

  • What is the maximum annual budget for maintenance activities, including condition assessment?

  • What is the best option for any particular capital asset: repair, replacement, rehabilitation, or refrain (do nothing)?

If you're asking the same questions or think that someone is going to ask these questions soon, consider developing a risk model as the first step to building a decision support tool.

Graphics make metrics so much more accessible for all levels of education! We use GIS in nearly all our projects because of this.

Managing the spikes in CIP management

Unmonitored Capital Improvement Programs (CIPs) notoriously slip into service of squeaky wheels. Whatever makes the most noise gets funding. Fortunately, most agencies watch their CIPs. They want to make sure things get done. INSERT HERE.

  • Which things get done - prioritization - trips people up.

  • How they get done - management - tends to catch people by surprise.

  • How much it costs to get things done changes with every year.

To serve the interests of the agency and its clients, Ewers Engineering developed a software tool to critical system elements quietly go belly-up, then have to be funded through expensive capitalization. When this happens, communities often lose their ability to adapt and begin a decades-long service to debt financing.

Better to evaluate the risk to the community or utility for each project, then prioritize the projects for funding from highest risk to lowest risk. This reveals what projects need funding and when. As a result, agencies can set aside money and staffing resources in anticipation of large needs.

That's exactly what we do with RD/CIP, our proprietary CIP development software. RD/CIP allows agencies to build realistic project costs and timelines, prioritizes projects based on their modeled risk to the community. It also treats project cost, risk, and time as dynamic elements.

  • Project risk of failure increases if a project isn't funded by deadlines.

  • Project costs increase with an annual inflation rate or set of rates, avoiding the mistake of putting projects on the street based on out-of-date cost estimates.

Have you got a CIP that keeps funding the easy projects (even while important system elements reach the end of their service life)? If you want to implement an intelligent, systematic, and transparent approach to CIP prioritization, give us a call about licensing RD/CIP to provide ongoing CIP development.

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMSs) can iron out maintenance challenges by focusing maintenance effort on proactive activities, rather than reactive ones. But the real payoff for the considerable effort involved in transitioning to a CMMS lies in developing a logic that attacks the issues with the highest risk of failure first.

Ewers Engineering has developed a failure risk-based CMMS logic for flexible implementation across a range of platforms that permits maintenance effort through the full range of proactive maintenance practices: Reactive, preventive, predictive, reliability-centered.

No matter what phase your CMMS development is in, we develop the CMMS into a flexible, transparent system capable of preventive, predictive, and reliability-centered maintenance activities at multiple sites.

This is a good time to undertake CMMS development because GIS-based CMMS has become a flexible commodity that can be developed with much less expense and more capability than was available as little as five years ago.

If your agency is developing the base data for a CMMS, consider maximizing the effectiveness of the result at this transition period. This is a time- and labor-intensive process. If it is structured well, this initial effort can develop a CMMS that can not only produce work orders and track completions, critical parts and supplies, and labor, but can be used to develop the data necessary for effective predictive maintenance practices like oil assessment, thermography, and vibration monitoring that can significantly extend the lifespan of large capital-intensive facilities. In addition, as operations and maintenance staff develop their skills with these advanced maintenance practices, staff culture of improvement tends to increase.