Great Lakes Water Authority [GLWA] next steps ?

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The new Karegnondi Water Authority plant is located near
Columbiaville, Michigan in Lapeer County.

Here is the 2016 Water Quality Report for Columbiaville:

http://columbiaville.org/secure/uplo...de=transparent

The reported fluoride in Columbiaville water, which was
well water at the time, was over 1.0 ppm.

Also check the level of chlorine in this report.

It was 1.5 parts per million [[ppm or milligrams per liter)
and the low end value of the range was 0.88 ppm.

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I am now selecting a random NON - Michigan utility for comparison purposes...Seattle, Washington, for comparisons of fluoride statements
of quantity of fluoride to be added and then the actual fluoride measured in their Water Quality Report.

First, what Seattle says it will add is 0.7 ppm.

http://www.seattle.gov/util/MyServic...ride/index.htm

Then, checking a recent annual Water Quality Report, one finds
that the fluoride for their two separate sources is listed as 0.7 ppm,

http://www.seattle.gov/util/cs/group...t/1_063972.pdf

and the fluoride range is 0.6 to 0.9 ppm.

n their chlorine residual reads 0.98 ppm.

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Here is a 2016 Water Quality Report for Royal Oak Township.
Look closely at the amount of fluoride reported to be present
in the water for Royal Oak Township.

https://www.oakgov.com/water/Documen...k_township.pdf

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Here is a 2016 Water Quality Report for Auburn Hills.
Again, check the ppm of fluoride reported to be present.

http://www.auburnhills.org/WATERQUALITYREPORT2016.pdf

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The City of Royal Oak has a 2017 Water Quality Report that
breaks out lab results by water treatment plant:

https://www.romi.gov/DocumentCenter/...ity-Report-PDF

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This one is from the City of Taylor [[or its Golf Course! )

http://www.lakesoftaylorgolf.com/Doc...er-Report-Info

Fluoride - 0.54 ppm.

Residual Chlorine - 0.67 ppm.

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One of the selling points for Karegnondi Water Authority water
is that they have two separate supplies, treated water and
raw water. The advantage for raw water is to industries so that
they will not have to treat their water supply to remove the
chemicals.

http://www.gc4me.com/business/karegn...raw_water2.php

Genesee County Drain Commissioner Jeff Wright: "This is about
protecting and building our economy":

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/ne...ant/107923086/

It is possible that GLWA is catering more to the industrial
customers, in competition with the Karegnondi Water Authority
maybe even, than to public health in the matter of fluoride in
the water.

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The City of Monroe, as deduced from its 2017 Water Quality Report,
targets 0.7 ppm fluoride and 1.0 ppm chlorine residual.

https://www.monroemi.gov/UserFiles/S...%202-21-18.pdf

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Again for the sake of comparison, this is the Water Quality Report
for Windsor, Canada. There is little fluoride in their water because
it is not added in. There is no mention of residual chlorine. They
do use ozone to disinfect their water.

https://www.townofwindsor.com/Docume...ty-report-2016

There was an earlier thread in DetroitYes about the fluoride
in the water in Windsor, Canada.

https://www.detroityes.com/mb/showth...To-Their-Water

Following up on that one:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windso...bers-1.4634555

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[[This is DWSD not GLWA) The lead pipe replacements in
Detroit as of right now are to be partial replacements rather
than the preferable full replacements:

http://michiganradio.org/post/risky-...-look-michigan

[O3H]

I wonder if the Rain Gauge data collected by MacombCounty for the issue of stormwater in the INTERCEPTOR will become public info ?

http://bit.ly/RainGaugesMacombCounty

Nobody wants to pay for rain - but they pay -- ohhh do they pay !!!

Some may remember this story in the newspapers
http://www.candgnews.com/news/water-...r-shores-95082

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[[Ahem, am still dilly dallying about calculating a working
estimate of what a drainage charge for an inch of rainwater
per square foot should be...but did not forget it entirely.)

In today's NON Detroit news, but helpful for comparisons and contrasts
with regional water matters including GLWA and the Flint water crisis,
there is a well written if slightly sensationalized New York Times article about problems in recent years with the Newark water supply:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/24/n...gtype=Homepage

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The "lean" philosophy as in lean manufacturing has been implemented
at GLWA as well as at other water and wastewater facilities.

https://tataandhoward.com/2017/09/no...ter-utilities/

There have been several articles recently such as this one today:

https://www.fox2detroit.com/news/lea...ir-shore-homes

While it is true that Lead and Copper Rule sampling methodologies
have been revamped as per legal requirements it is also true that
the addition of chemicals to water and wastewater has been modified - usually less of chemicals are being added - in keeping with lean philosophies.

It is true that cost control is more of a focus for utilities as kind of
a side effect from the extension of "lean" throughout much of the economy. Is adding the former, higher amount of chemicals more
important, or is having a little savings better? The savings might
go towards employee health care costs and higher wages.

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This is an update on the situation in metro Detroit for recent changes in
sampling and reporting for Lead and Copper Rule water tests.
There is quite a bit of info in this article but the info is in compact
bits on interrelated topics.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/11/17/stricter-rules-confirmation-lead-water-metro-detroit-communities/2450044001/

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The Action Level for lead in water has remained unchanged for years
at 15 ppb, and though State of Michigan will change the Action Level
to 12 ppb, it has not yet taken effect.

There are now more samples being collected, they are being collected
from known lead lines specifically, and some samples are being
collected without a preflush. That is what has most notably changed
at this time.

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To "snip" a statement from the Detroit News article - edited for
emphasis:

"[The State of Michigan]'s administrative rules were unsuccessfully
legally challenged by Detroit, Livonia, Great Lakes Water Authority,
and the Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner, who argued
the regulations impose unnecessary costs and will cause public money
to replace private lead service lines."

The motivation behind the lawsuit was costs. [[The bolding is mine.)
There has been, since before the standup of GLWA, a focus on
the costs. To be fair, most of us are in a place where we have
some concern about rising utility costs.

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This is pretty good news about City of Detroit water quality from
a few days ago:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/...-action-level/

Also one quick check of the tap water within the last week
at this location showed residual chlorine as 1.1 milligrams
per liter which should knock out most of the bugs in the piping.

[lpg]

To "snip" a statement from the Detroit News article - edited for
emphasis:

"[The State of Michigan]'s administrative rules were unsuccessfully
legally challenged by Detroit, Livonia, Great Lakes Water Authority,
and the Oakland County Water Resources Commissioner, who argued
the regulations impose unnecessary costs and will cause public money
to replace private lead service lines."

The motivation behind the lawsuit was costs. [[The bolding is mine.)
There has been, since before the standup of GLWA, a focus on
the costs. To be fair, most of us are in a place where we have
some concern about rising utility costs.

I watched the Lincoln Park meeting on lead line replacement and the engineer stated that most of the water mains, due to age, would also need replacing. The estimate for just the lead line repair would be $3-5000.00 per household. 70 million if all mains and lead lines were replaced. And since this is a unfunded mandate a lot of cities will end up with sky high water bills [[ours also have rubbish and recycling and other charges on them) and people unable to pay. He did also mention that the state is paying for Flint to replace the lead lines, but no more money is available for other cities.

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An overall vision for wastewater treatment in Southeast Michigan
in the near to long term is discussed in this Detroit Free Press
article:

Metro Detroit sewer plan aims to curb costs and pollution too [[freep.com)

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This article appeared in Scientific American in August of 2013.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/a...detroits-woes/

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GLWA is currently raising wholesale water and sewer rates by roughly 3%. The stated reason is that the price of the chlorine that is used has gone up by 80%. This is true; if anything the price may have gone up even more.

This is an industry analysis of recent chlor alkali price increases. It's well known that in 2020 and 2022 there were two plant fires for plants producing pool chemical chlorine tablets so those became much more scarce and costly,
but availability should be better in 2023 and prices should moderate. However, this is a different raw material stream from what water treatment facilities use.

https://www.owi.com/commercial/resou...view-june-2022

One of the main industrial chlorine suppliers, Olin, has over
recent past decades acquired smaller independent producing plants and then reduced chlor-alkali production capacity. As the linked article shows, Olin succeeded in engineering a large price increase per bulk domestic short ton of chlorine, to about $800 a ton from $227 a ton.

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For the freshwater side of GLWA, this is recent water usage expressed in million gallons of water per day [mgd].

https://glwa.wpenginepowered.com/wp-...umpage-Web.pdf

The average is 382 million gallons of water per day [MGD].

In a recent Water Quality Report the measured free chlorine residual
was about 0.8 ppm [parts per million, also mg per liter, mg/L]. However I checked a couple of tap water samples and the result was a little higher than 1 ppm. So it is possible that the recent chlorine dosage for fresh water is 2 ppm, with 1 ppm being consumed by demand, leaving 1 ppm as a free chlorine residual.

https://www.thewastewaterblog.com/si...eight-of-water

Equation 9.1 in the above is the utility crunch equation I use.

I used it to compute that 6,372 pounds of chlorine are added daily
to the average daily multi plant flow of 382 MGD. That's about 3.2
short tons which should cost about $ 2,550.00 each average day.

Times 365, that's $930,750.00 per year. This is only for the freshwater
side, the water that is piped to consumers. The wastewater side still
has combined effluent and therefore uses much more chlorine in a wet year.

For the sake of this argument, let's make the assumption that an average water consumer in southeast Michigan uses 100 gallons per day. Then the number of consumers would be 3,820,000. Each consumer should now be paying about 24 cents per year for their fair share of the much more expensive chlorine.

So where did I make mistakes...

[Danny]

That will keep the Macomb County sewage for using Lake St Clair as a cesspool. Folks these days can't go swimming in Metro-Beach.