Two Arizona Campuses offer state-of-the-art training while demonstrating new developments for onsite wastewater technologies.
By DeWitt Smith
If necessity is the mother of invention, then the fear of running out of water created the Arizona Groundwater Management Act in 1983. That legislation catapulted Arizona into a worldwide leadership position in the field of hydrology and spurred the City of Scottsdale, AZ, to do its part by setting a standard for the study of water reclamation and the training of water treatment professionals. The Scottsdale Water Campus is a testament to can-do thinking to solve a pressing and statewide problem: making sure there’s enough water for the next 100 years.
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Photo: Scottsdale Public Art |
Even though the water campus started operating in 2000, the idea goes back to the 1983 Groundwater Management Act in Arizona, explains Brad Hemken of the international engineering construction company Black & Veatch. And that act, of course, came about when the groundwater started to drop. “The act was passed to curb this, to conserve and reclaim water,” says Hemken. “It was to limit mining groundwater.”
Enter a group funded by the National Science Foundation—SAHRA, which stands for Semi-arid Hydrology and Riparian Areas. The purpose is to educate people about water conservation in the fastest-growing part of the United States: the Southwest. As pollution and a swelling population have created the demand and threat of depletion on the water supply, the private and public sectors went rushing to the scene to curb a disaster. The upshot was a growing discipline in water management and policy and a field of hydrology.
Recharging Desert Water
Sustainable water in the desert seems like an oxymoron. But back in 1951 when Scottsdale was incorporated, running out of water didn’t seem to be a problem. At that time, the town of 2,000 people covered 1 square mile, but over the next several decades Scottsdale’s populace had grown 40-fold. The 1980 population was 88,000; by 1990, it had grown to 130,000; and the 2000 Census population was 202,000. By then, the town also had expanded to 200 square miles.
In addition to the population explosion, Scottsdale became a tourist and golf mecca, with 40-plus private golf courses and 60 public golf courses. It takes a whole lot of water to keep those greens and fairways pretty and ensure those tourist dollars continue to flow. The question was: Where to get that water supply.
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Photos: Applied Process Equipment |
| Water treatment is a necessity in the Southwest. |
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| Sustainable water is a reality in the desert states. |
The answer, Scottsdale decided, was to take the science of hydrology to a whole new level.
“I’d been here about 10 years when I became general manager of the Water Resources Department,” says David Mansfield. “I finished up the construction of the project, and I would say it has met and surpassed our expectations. The impetus, of course, was to meet the requirements of the state’s requirement of the Groundwater Act. We were working to achieve a safe yield of our water supplies.
“Basically, we needed to be sure the amount of water we pumped out of the ground was not greater than the recycled water being put back in,” says Mansfield. “The idea was to be a good steward of the environment through a sustainable practice. So we took advantage of treatment technology by putting water back into the ground.”
The first year Scottsdale achieved the balance of equal amounts of water pumped out and returned was 2006. Mansfield says that year, the city recharged more than 8,000 acre-feet of water, the amount used by 16,000 homes. The annual amount that an average family of four uses is a half-acre of water.
“We shifted our system from being 50% dependent on groundwater supplies in 2000 down to 28% today. This is the plan we’ve had in place for the past seven years,” Mansfield says.
A major component to the 1983 water act is the requirement that all municipalities demonstrate a 100-year ensured supply of water, and without that, no development is permitted in what’s called the areas of Phoenix and Tucson. By contrast, California has a 20-year requirement.
Another influential condition to water reclamation is the lack of rain. Arizona’s annual rainfall is about 6 inches or 7 inches. “The Southwest is in a drought and has been for the past eight years,” says Mansfield. “The fact is, we have more restrictive water regulations, which has an impact on our treatment technologies.”
“The Scottsdale city council and city manager have worked hard to get the message across that water’s the lifeblood of the desert community,” Mansfield says. “Our city slogan for this is ‘Water, use it wisely.’ If people understand our environment, that water is a finite resource, they will observe a water conservation ethic. We’ve had great compliance so far.”
From an engineering point of view, Scottsdale is doing it all right. Peter Fox, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Arizona State University, was part of the Scottsdale water campus project from the start. “The need was multiple-fold. The city was going to run out of water if the population continued to grow. I was called in 15 years ago when the City of Scottsdale was looking for outside expertise and verification that it was making the right decision,” says Fox.
As he explains it, the Scottsdale city officials were taking a very conservative approach and following the model of the Water Factory in Orange County, CA, the highly regarded water purification program, started in 1976, for reclamation in southern California. Orange County’s problem was that saltwater was intruding into the aquifer.
“The technology they were using was going through reverse osmosis. At the rate the development was going, Scottsdale was going to have a problem showing a 100-year ability of water supply,” says Fox.
That, of course, meant no further development. The city would have had to halt giving out building permits, and that was going to be a costly loss. “The city officials came up with the concept, but it was really Leonard Dueker’s large idea. It was his baby,” says Fox.
“It took about seven years because there was a fair amount of pilot testing that had to be done,” says Fox. “With the reverse osmosis membrane, you have to treat the water very well before going to reverse osmosis.”
The technology is rising rapidly in this field, Fox explains. The reverse osmosis method’s original purpose was for desalinization. The pores of the membranes, which are made of polymers, are incredibly small so that the bacteria can’t pass through. Chemical companies, like Dow, make the membranes. And now General Electric has entered the field and bought up a bunch of membrane companies.
Researchers at the University of California–Los Angeles (UCLA) developed the reverse osmosis membranes in the 1960s and were pioneers in the field. There were signs 40 years ago that water shortage was going to be a critical problem in southern California, which is mostly desert. So the business of water and water conservation is big business. Try to picture this: Southern California uses more than 250 million gallons of water per day for everything, from drinking water to irrigation, according to a UCLA Engineering Department report in 2004.
“But with every new advance to make our lives easier, there are also new challenges,” says Fox.
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Photos: Applied Process Equipment |
| The hydrology field continues to need more trained workers. |
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| The University of Arizona has a department of hydrology. |
For instance, the water is harder to clean because of all the new medicines—chemical compounds—that people ingest. “When we clean 12 millions gallons a day, and the filtering produces 10 million gallons, what happens to the other 2 million?” Fox asks. “It becomes a concentrate. Reverse osmosis is great if you’re next to the ocean. But we’re inland, and we reuse it for irrigation. A lot of the water evaporates, which means there’s more than a million tons a year that’s left in the soil.”
Creating a Water Campus
Managing wastewater is nothing new. It began with the Minoans on the island of Crete between 1,700 BC and 1,500 BC. The Minoans had developed advanced plumbing and designed places to dispose of organic wastes. The Romans, who advanced all manner of living to new levels, took the treatment of wastewater treatment very seriously, and their methods were considered the most developed of any civilization prior to the 19th century. Interestingly, it was only in 1854 that the link was established between cholera and contaminated drinking water by an English scientist, John Snow.
It was just more than a century later that the University of Arizona developed its hydrology department, in the early 1960s, culminated in the introduction of the Scottsdale Water Campus in 2001. The Scottsdale campus has distinguished itself as the largest wastewater treatment facility to combine microfiltration and reverse osmosis (RO) technologies to elevate wastewater to drinking-water standards. The system utilized by the campus uses a “new generation of thin-film composite RO membrane” allowing for a high rejection of dissolved material at about half of the operating pressure, which contributes to a significant reduction in energy consumption.
Hemken was in on the Scottsdale Water Campus project from the start. The company did the design engineering and in 2001 was awarded the Grand Prize Award from the Design from American Academy of Environmental Engineers national Excellence in Environmental Engineering annual awards competition for its design. “The thing about the Scottsdale Water Campus is that they’re taking their reclaimed water to a very high quality,” Hemken says. “Not all reclamation plants have reverse osmosis.”
Not only is the process setting a high standard the water campus itself has set a benchmark. Located in the heart of Scottsdale, the building’s architecture had to be integrated and compatible with the affluent community in order to avoid being an eyesore. For example, the entrance to the Scottsdale Water Campus includes the Water to Water installation. An interactive demonstration of water resource management, the installation includes a perforated metal wall that—when activated by visitors—triggers a symphony of large shower heads and small faucets in a veritable symphony of water works. The purpose of the installation reflects the aim of the campus itself: the importance of protecting and judiciously using the desert water supply.
Gary Woodard, assistant director of the Hydrology Department at the University of Arizona, explains the purpose of the program: “It’s not that we just need more people in the field, but [we] need people with different skill sets than we thought about 10 years ago. To start with, the base of Arizona’s economy relies on water, and we’re in an environment where water is scarce. So maintaining the surface water and managing groundwater is critical to the economy.”
“As a result, the university became a center of research for managing water globally as well,” says Woodard. “We’re also the land-grant college of Arizona. And since the object of the research is to find the most efficient way to irrigate crops, that accounts for a lot of research. I have not found a university here or abroad that has our resources.”
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Photo: Applied Process Equipment |
| Training seminars for reverse osmosis systems are becoming more commonplace in the Southwest. |
“We’ve got a deficit, and we’re in the middle of a drought,” explains Martin Yoklic, a research scientist from the University of Arizona with experise in sustainable community planning.
“Water traditionally has gone from the source—and our source is the Colorado River—to uses in the communities, to the drain, to the filtration plant to clean it up, and to dispose of it in the ground. What we’re doing is secondary use of water, which goes to parks and golf courses. After treatment it becomes more saline.”
The derogatory term to describe treated water is “toilet to tap,” Yoklic says. Factually, the water may be less desirable only because of the salt content. Even so, a treatment plant puts the water back into the river, and the next town down the river puts it through a filter plant and then drinks it.
According to Yoklic, the Scottsdale Water Campus is second to none. “Scottsdale has been leading the area in water reclamation,” he says. “They’ve got one of the most sophisticated systems in the country, and what’s important is that environmental engineers get the training in the industry.”
Flagstaff’s Field of Dreams
The program at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, administered by the College of Engineering, was developed to demonstate the new technology of onsite wastewater reclamation. Its focus is to train, teach, and have hands-on classes at a campus for onsite wastewater treatment and disposal.
Paul Trotta, the program director, talks about the genesis of the Onsite Wastewater Demonstration Project. “Years ago we started out issuing a pamphlet for the installation of ‘septic tanks according to state rules,” Trotta says. “This stayed static for most of the ’80s and ’90s. Then the regulations started to change, and the pamphlet grew to be 50 pages. Program codes overlapped, and so the state rewrote a uniform code. What happened was a complicated system. People needed groundwater discharge permits, resident systems permits, commercial permits, and a whole mishmash of permits.”
Up to then, Trotta had been a consultant and doing research. “I could see that at that point, we were going to need a training program to bring people up to speed with all these new rules,” he says. “Everyone was excited about having a uniform training program, and money came from the EPA, the university, and the private sector.”
The onsite training was going to be extensive to demonstrate installation and use, to do research about innovative technology, and to have training for certification. There was also going to be training for site evaluation, system selection, design, construction, inspection, operation, and maintenance. But, according to Trotta, who was a wastewater engineer, the project faltered. Apparently, the state was leery about administrating yet another licensing program, and money ran out for the necessary research.
“We had a fairly intense year in 2004 and did a whole slew of courses,” he says. “Basically the program went dormant because of lack of interest.”
As he explains it, people had what he calls a field-of-dreams mentality: Build it and they will come. But Trotta now sees that it was an idea slightly ahead of its time.
The good news is a revived interest in the Onsite Wastewater Demonstration Project, so much so that NAU held a two-day training seminar in July. “I was in professinal bliss and pleasantly surpised at how many people showed up and how well it all worked,” says Trotta. “It was so positive that the Arizona Water Institute, which has identified onsite eduction as one of its priorities, wants to have a partnership with us to to put together a comprehensive education program.
“The original intent was to build this program on three prongs: training and education, research, and demonstration,” Trotta says, traveling en route to Ghana to demonstrate an onsite water treatment system for an African village four days after the seminar.
“The education aspect is for teaching and certification of people who are going to administer water treatment programs. The research is to see how things work. And the demonstration is a place to show the innovative technology,” Trotta says.
There were also a number of exhibitors who showed up at the two-day event, and according to Trotta, two manufacturers have stepped forward to get control, hydraulic, and monitoring systems together so NAU can run wastewater throughout its Onsite Water Treatment campus. “We really want to develop training programs for Arizona with respect to the regulations and inspections,” says Trotta.
The interest to revitalize the NAU program was fueled in large party by a group of nonprofit organizations. The Arizona Onsite Wastewater Recycling Association (AzOWRA) is one of them, and its board chairman, Richard Sinclair, is leading the charge.
“The need for this type of training has been ongoing despite the program being mothballed for awhile,” says Sinclair, a businessman based in Scottsdale. “Going back five or six years ago, we had put a great deal of time, money, and effort into the demonstration project. For example, Arizona Public Service donated a piece of land at the south end of the campus. And the benefit of using this onsite source water in quantity is that it represents residential wastewater. Other training places use municipal wastewater. It’s not the same.”
Sinclair stresses the importance of this being a perfect model for testing and for monitoring since it replicates the real thing. And he goes on to describe the 8-acre campus site. “It’s fully fenced, and there’s a large enclosed area for training and storing pumps. It’s a functional alternative wastewater treatment center,” he says.
After the weekend seminar, Sinclair was even more keen about the program’s re-emergence. “It was really an outstanding success,” Sinclair says. “We had 90 paid attendees [and] a large number of exhibitors, so the total came to about 150. The group was a cross-section of engineers, regulators, and installers, from well-drilling companies to pumping companies.”
Sinclair says the technical session had more than 50 people present. “This was all about the rules and regulations of Arizona, how they came to be, what they are, and how to design systems that are compliant,” says Sinclair. “In the installer session that ran eight hours, people were shown the basics of pumps and control systems. And the third track was for realtors. Every time a house is sold, the spectic tanks have to be inspected. These days realtors have to know how to be in compliance. There were 40 realtors who showed up.”
Minnesota-based SJE-Rhombus, the largest suppliers of controls in the wastewater industry, sent two people from its headquarters to conduct the class on control panels. In addition, a member of the New Mexico Onsite Association said he would like to do a joint event with AzOWRA, says Sinclair.
Link Summers, president of the Professional Onsite Wastewater Reuse Association of New Mexico, says the seminar in Flagstaff was terrific. “I went over to the meeting for its first convention, and Richard [Sinclair] had invited me to this one,” says Summers. “The problems in Arizona are the same problems we have in New Mexico. And I spent a lot of time speaking with Ed Swanson,” says Summers.
Swanson, one of the seminar presenters, is a senior environmental engineer from the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality. “The NAU facilities were great, the speakers were interesting and knowledgeable, and there were good demonstrations at the training center,” says Summers.
“I learned a lot about Arizona rules and their approach to their problems. They’ve adopted performance-based regulations instead of prescriptive ones. Performance-based shows that it works,” Summers emphasizes.
One of the technical representatives at the NAU seminar was Brian Scheffe, who works for two Boulder, CO–based companies: Front Range Precast and Hoot Systems. “I felt that the conference was well organized and efficient. I was also impressed by the level of interest by the attendees,” says Scheffe, who’s worked in the industry for 10 years.
Scheffe was there to exhibit the Hoot wastewater treatment systems. “The campus is a good-size school, and the facilties were more than adequate,” says Scheffe. “I always enjoy being in a university setting because we’re always training the next generation of practioners. I was also impressed with the Engineers Without Borders program. I thought it was neat to let the students experience something outside the school enviornment,” he adds.
Sinclair expounds on some of the training session, which included new equipment and methods, such as ultraviolet use, the newest technology in treating water. He explains the major transition from centralized wastewater treatment to onsite treatment.
“During the ’70s and ’80s, the trend was to pipe waste to big water treatment plants then to pipe it out to wastewater,” he says. “The government helped cities expand their wastewater plants. But federal funds have been significantly reduced. And about three years ago, the EPA endorsed high quality onsite treatment.
“Three years ago, only 25% of new homes were on onsite treatment,” Sinclair says. “Currently, the percentage of new homes on ATUs [alternative treatment units] is anywhere from 33% to 35%. And it’s expected to grow to 40% by the end of 2008.”
Sinclair also stresses the importance of training and teaching a uniform code. “The Southwest has unique problems and conditions, and our training will be about our problems. The key focus of our association is education. And that’s why the Onsite Wastewater Demonstration Project is such a remarkable facility. There’s nothing else like it to educate people about the new methods and technology.”
DeWitt Smith is a media specialist based in Ojai, CA.
OW- November/December 2007
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