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With approximately 23 million onsite and clustered wastewater
treatment systems in the US, being able to design, model and
track systems effectively can be a challenge for both the
onsite manager who's working toward meeting changing
regulatory requirements, and local agencies responsible for
wastewater management. That's where software programs
can help organize the various records and provide the capability
to make adjustments to the existing operations in order to
meet more stringent regulatory demands.
The current offering of software falls primarily within
two categories. First are software programs that are created
to assist in design and modeling of onsite treatment facilities.
While useful in designing new onsite systems, they also are
efficient for providing assistance in redesigning existing
systems in order to address changing regulatory requirements.
These software programs utilize a variety of data inputs and
can provide various "what-if" scenarios. The second
category includes software systems that track the maintenance
and management of existing systems. These software programs
are useful in helping those responsible for overseeing the
inspection and regulation of onsite systems.
Designing For Results
Onsite facilities typically have a variety of components with
wide ranges of function and tolerance. The total efficiency
of the entire system is affected by the sum of all these components
and the effluent processed. A system can handle small fluctuations
in both the quantity and the quality of the water being processed
within the tolerances of its components. But ensuring that
the discharged water is within the requirements of the discharge
permit, especially if there is extreme variability in the
intake system, can be a challenge. What if there is a change
in the manufacturing process that results in an increase in
nitrogen or phosphorus? What course of action will be needed
if the local regulatory agency suddenly tightens the requirements
on suspended solids or biological oxygen demand (BOD)?
That's where software that allows effective modeling
and prediction of output comes into play. These software programs
are particularly effective if one has process upgrades, says
Hank Andres, process modeling specialist at Hamilton, ON-based
Hydromantis Inc. The company has six software products providing
a variety of features to the onsite water treatment industry,
but the company's flagship product, GPS-X, provides
approximately 600 process models that allow various scenarios
to be tested. "If you have some existing infrastructure
that you want to tweak, or come up with a different operational
strategy to get better nitrogen removal or better phosphorus
removal and the like, the software can handle it," says
Andres.
Key inputs into the model include total suspended solids,
BOD, total nitrogen and volatile suspended solids. "Those
are the key things that you have to know. You've got
to know a lot more than that to set up a calibrated working
model, but those are the big guys," says Andres. "Of
course, the most important thing you've got to hit is
the effluent criteria."
While the GPS-X software is not primarily designed for sizing
a plant, it can be used to provide guidance in system design.
"We have done jobs where we know, this is the effluent
criteria that I must meet and here's the maximum physical
space that I have to work with," says Andres. "What's
the smallest design or most cost-effective design we can come
up with? GPS-X has an analyzer and optimizer module that you
can use to back-calculate the tank volumes and airflow rates;
it even calculates kilowatt hours if you want to know how
much power that's needed to run blowers at this airflow
to meet these effluent criteria."
Andres cites an example in which a client in Arizona used
the model to meet a tougher set of regulations that was placed
on it by the regulatory agency. "The regulatory agency
came down and said, we know you've been meeting these
BOD limits; now we want much stricter limits on ammonia. We
had to develop a calibrated model of this plant that had many
different facets to it, to see if we could get it to nitrify
at the level that they needed to achieve the more stringent
ammonia requirement. For that particular project, since it
was a municipality, we were actually able to divert some of
the flow that comes off the digesters after the solids are
processed. We split the flow difference, with 30% going to
another plant, and they took only 70% of that flow. Then,
with some different recycle flows and using some additional
aeration tanks that had been out of service for about five
or six years that they put back online, we were able to meet
the criteria."
The need to acquire design and modeling software can be
a challenge, especially when it comes to justifying it to
the purchasing folks. But when compared to redesigning the
plant to meet changing requirements, such software can be
invaluable to ensuring a design that works, says Andres. "The
number-one reason to buy software is to make a calibrated
model of your existing system and then see what changes have
to be made to meet some new regulatory requirement,"
he observes. "The thing that I get the absolute most
of is, I'm upgrading my plant that's been in the
ground for 30 to 50 years. The regulatory agency is telling
me that I've got to meet more stringent nitrogen or
more stringent phosphorous criteria and I've got to
do it with less chlorine, with less polymer added or no chemical
addition. Number two is people saying, I have these aeration
tanks or clarifiers or a chlorine tank, and I want to upgrade
to, say, an ultraviolet light disinfection, or I want to put
a membrane bioreactor in my existing infrastructure. Modeling
could be an effective tool to predict a lot of ‘what-if'
scenarios down the road."
Software programs, including those offered by Hydromantis,
come with a variety of features and prices that are designed
to meet various needs of clients, ranging from a few thousand
gallons per day up. Determining what software is right for
your facility requires research. "If the customer was
buying a car, I'd say do your research," suggests
Andres. "Make sure you do thorough Web searches. Contact
the company for references for people that they've done
work for in the past. As a company we will not sell you something
that you don't need. We're conscious of the budget
of smaller versus larger companies. We are a small company,
so we are definitely conscious of all those things."
Knowing What Systems Are Out There
Increasingly, the responsibility for ensuring that onsite
water treatment plants are not contributing to either surface
or groundwater pollution is falling on the shoulders of towns,
cities and counties. These local agencies are bearing the
brunt of implementing monitoring programs in an era of tight
budgets and stretched staff. In many cases, these municipalities
require various reports from the operators and service providers
of onsite facilities, but in a lot of cases, those reports
end up piled in a corner. Follow-up actions, if any, are driven
more from urgent complaints rather than proactive management—the
phone call from an irate resident or the threat of litigation
from an environmental group. The scenario is an all-too-familiar
one for those in local governments.
Fortunately, software is available to take the stack of
reports and produce organization out of chaos. In addition,
various companies have developed Web-based applications that
allow the information to be accessible and current to all
the stakeholders.
At Stone Environmental, in Montpelier, VT, the company has
been involved in water resource and wastewater management
for nearly a decade. Over this period of time, the company
has recognized the need for good data in order to provide
effective, community-wide, onsite management planning. "Since
the very beginning, we felt the need to develop a database
or information system to handle the various aspects of onsite
systems in order to do the community-wide planning effort,"
says David Healy, vice president of the Applied Information
Management program at Stone. "The origin of developing
Integrated Wastewater Information Management System (IWMS)
grew out of the need to help communities understand what they
have and where they have it."
According to Barbara Patterson, project database specialist,
the company's software manages onsite information and
everything related to the system. "When I say everything,
I mean permits, inspections and correspondence with owners
regarding their need for system maintenance. It also [monitors]
well information that may be associated with monitoring the
system. We generally start with the town or county parcel
date set because that gives us all the property in the community
as well as the owner information. Then, depending on the client
and whether or not they have any electronic data from their
permit information on their onsite waste systems, we may do
an additional import of information of their historical permit
on the onsite systems. Oftentimes, information isn't
available and they just have hard copies files. What IWIMS
does is it manages onsite systems in detail so the community
can really understand what types of systems they have and
what types of components are on those systems and what type
of maintenance has been done on the system. The way it does
that, it tracks specifically which parcel the different components
of the system can be on. So, for example, if there is a community
wastewater system that's serving a neighborhood, it's
possible that the septic tank is on one parcel and the leach
field or drain field are on another parcel. IWIMS actually
tracks the information correctly."
The software is designed to provide a fairly robust reporting
system that allows the municipality to access a variety of
event reports over various time units. "If the county
wants to know something about any kind of event or a summary
of events over any particular user-defined period, whether
it be a month or a year or a quarter, they can do that as
well," says Healy. "The other related piece is
that we're building in an Internet map service so that
they can look at the level of information right in the system.
They can find out where they are in their community within
the application without having to go outside of the application.
It will have built-in GIS capability as well."
"The system only works if the information is put in,"
warns Healy. "If you have an inspection that noticed
that there's been a violation or a system surface flow
reported that could be entered into the system and an inspector's
visit recorded, you could actually track where there has been
an inspection and what has been the outcome of that inspection.
The system could be used to issue some sort of notification
to the landowner that's having problems. The same thing
is true with the monitoring data. We had one client that used
the monitoring data to track the impact on groundwater and
whether there are issues related to discharges from subsurface
disposal method and location to groundwater. So depending
on whether you've set up a monitoring system or required
a monitoring system for a particular onsite system, you can
use the system to scan that data to show where there are potential
problems coming up."
Collecting data is kind of a cat-and-mouse game, observes
Healy. "You need to have the information put into it
in order to use it to manage at the community level, where
you have issues that you want to regulate. A number of communities
have problem areas and they set up a management district where
they're requiring a three-year pump-out. The system
is set up to treat different areas. You can code any parcel
by the type of maintenance that's required on that system,
and with the system generate the list of who needs to be notified
about what kind of maintenance. We've seen a variety
of ways that communities have used the system to manage the
many different kinds of systems as well as problems that they
have. It's pretty flexible, and it really works based
on how much information gets to be put in and if it's
maintained. One of the things with the software is, if you
don't use it as your daily bread, so to speak, it's
very difficult to have it work for you."
Getting Data Into the System
One potential solution for the challenge of getting the data
into the system is to require those who provide the maintenance
to update the records. That's the premise of the software
developed by Carmody Data Systems Inc., of Deforest, WI. "We
started the program back in 1997," says Scott Carmody,
president. "It was born out of a request for proposal
that the state of Wisconsin had for a statewide management
program. As projects usually go, the state quickly realized
that they did not have money to do it, and the whole thing
got dropped. A couple of counties liked my direction, and
one of them was Wood County, WI. We spent about two years
with the county talking with all the people involved to try
and figure out what is really going on here. What we realized
is, it's a much bigger issue than just filing a report.
You've got service providers that cross county lines;
you've got counties that all operate independently from
what the state is asking, in some cases. In some cases the
states will have their basic rules but they won't enforce
them. So you have pockets of enforcement. The service providers
faced a real precarious situation where, if they cross three
or four county lines, it's very possible that they'll
be filling out three or four different kinds of reports. And
then if the counties even have staff to deal with the reports,
the information may or may not get processed. So it really
was a situation where, even if they tried to do the maintenance,
there were more things fighting against them to do it."
Carmody recognized that the issue was driven more by how
to manage the information generated as much as it was how
to ensure that maintenance was being performed. "Everybody
is so concerned regarding maintenance that they don't
step back and say, how are we even going to deal with the
information? The first thing that we needed to do was get
the information to the counties in a format that was usable.
We went with the Web, and at the time we were the first ones
to attempt this."
The basis for the software was that the service providers
would input the onsite system maintenance data directly into
reports that were based on the Web. "We were told that
there would be no way that we would get the service providers
to use the Internet, that it just won't happen,"
recalls Carmody. "To everybody else's surprise,
the service providers are quite savvy. They're very
good businessmen. Most of them were well aware of the Internet.
What we did with the program is we put the county in a situation
where their information was in real time. The service provider
would file a pumping report today, and it would be filed with
the county today. Now the county was put in a situation where
they could actually react to real data instead of looking
at a box full of reports in a corner and wondering what is
really going on out there."
The company provides management and reporting services within
the Florida Keys. "They have to have state inspections
done, so we've got a setup for state inspections,"
says Carmody. "The service providers can just log in
to the system for whatever counties they work in and use the
program. The reports for that county can be custom-built,
and whatever shows up for Joe Blow in whatever county he's
in, the report will show up in exactly the format that the
county wants. When we first got the data from Florida, they
just knew they had 7,000 operational permits, but they didn't
know which ones were which. We had 2,000 systems that were
unknown when we started, and a year and a half later it's
down to 20."
Due to the intuitive design of the software, the service
providers were quickly able to learn how to use it to access
the reports, especially using the search functions. "It
was funny. When I did my very first presentation of the system
I had one of the old guys in the back," recalls Carmody.
"He raises his hand and he goes, ‘You know, I
damn near can't spell my own name, let alone somebody
else's.' It was certainly a funny comment, and
he was a good guy. I just showed him it's as simple
as hitting the letter Q. You hit search, and all the names
that start with Q will pop up, and now you just match the
names with the address. And he says, ‘You know, I can
do that.' So you know we needed to kind of work with
them to help take the fear out of using this type of program."
The system is designed to be user-friendly and consistent.
"We're operating this program in about 83 to 85
different regulatory communities," says Carmody. "I
can take the service providers from the Florida Keys and bring
them up to Wisconsin and they wouldn't miss a beat on
operating this program. The information might be a little
different, the report structure might be a little different,
but they wouldn't miss a beat on knowing how to use
it. The consistency is really what I was striving for. You
need the system to have the flexibility to say, OK, we did
it that way for a while but now we need to change, to grow.
Our motto is: Whatever we're doing today will change
tomorrow, so be ready for it."
LYNN MERRILL is a consultant based
in southern California.
OW - January/February 2006 |
