Great Lakes Water Authority [GLWA] next steps ?

[Honky Tonk]

GLWA was taking corrective action by stopping basin washing and adding
powdered activated carbon at the Southwest treatment plant at about noon
on Thursday January 12th. However IF turbidity had been entering the
distribution system ahead of noon on Thursday AND the water contained
bacteria then shelter dogs and others COULD have been getting sick from
the bacteria even as late as Sunday January 15th. USUALLY for most
water systems there is an automatic system monitoring the effluent
turbidity as well as a person running periodic sample tests.

So there's an issue @ the Delray plant. How does that explain 313WX's bacon water in NE Detroit? Why do issues exist in some areas and others seem to be fine? I didn't realize Detroit has multiple water issues. We used to have the best water on the planet.

[Lowell]

Hey Dumpling. Just wanted to give a shout out to say how much I appreciate your insights and insider's knowledge of this "out of sight, out of mind" topic -- until we have a Flint or Sterling Heights collapse -- of water and sewage. Thanks and keep it coming.

[Dumpling]

The southwest plant problem doesn't explain the bacon water. I have no idea.
One thing that concerns water works professionals, though, are what are
called "cross-connections", where sources of impure water flow into the clean
water system. The water that leaves a treatment plant can be of the highest
quality, but let's say an equivalent of Dearborn Ham is located two blocks
away from 313WX, and they clean their equipment at the end of their work
day, and they have a pressurized system to dispose of their wastewater, and this
is inadvertently "cross-connected" with the drinking water, then, yes, you
would get bacon water. Cross-connections are more probable when the
drinking water supplied pressure is low.

[Dumpling]

Lowell, thanks for the appreciation! But it yours and everyone else's
hard earned money that we get.

[Honky Tonk]

The southwest plant problem doesn't explain the bacon water. I have no idea.
One thing that concerns water works professionals, though, are what are
called "cross-connections", where sources of impure water flow into the clean
water system. The water that leaves a treatment plant can be of the highest
quality, but let's say an equivalent of Dearborn Ham is located two blocks
away from 313WX, and they clean their equipment at the end of their work
day, and they have a pressurized system to dispose of their wastewater, and this
is inadvertently "cross-connected" with the drinking water, then, yes, you
would get bacon water. Cross-connections are more probable when the
drinking water supplied pressure is low.

That's what I said. Somewhere along the route, contaminated water is leaching into, what supposedly, is clean drinking water. There's no way to do a "best guesstimate" where that might be occurring and excavate to do an exploratory? That's awful people are living like that. Who knows what other kinds of contamination is in that water?

[Dumpling]

I looked [[not very hard) but could not find a contact for a cross connection
specialist at DWSD. If I thought I had a cross connection problem I would
call the number used for water main breaks - not the exact same thing,
but the best alternative.

There is a City of Detroit Veolia Transition Plan for DWSD Retail Services
out there on the Web, dating from 2014, following the Detroit bankruptcy
but before the start of GLWA. That Plan contains this note: "Back-flow
prevention and cross connection - important issue that is not currently
being addressed"

[Dumpling]

Here is the NTH consultant review for the DWSD pump station that
the Oakland-Macomb Interceptor runs into - they concluded that it
imminently needed a rehab.

http://www.nthconsultants.com/northe...g-station.html

[Dumpling]

Willi has another NTH consultant review summary, dated October 2012,
posted at his site. This one was done on the Oakland-Macomb Interceptor.
Presumably the "stressed" portions of it were repaired by 2015:

https://redrundrain.wordpress.com/as...ceptor-system/


Willi's wish list includes tying the City of Warren sewerage system
[[to remove its stormwater in particular) into the Oakland-Macomb
interceptor that runs north-south through the City of Warren [[aka
the Edison Corridor) en route to the DWSD/GLWA system.

[[It is a little disrespectful for me to use his first name but it is what
he used when he used to post on DetroitYes.)

[Dumpling]

In one of the many comments to one of the many articles about the
interceptor problem, someone wondered about the backup generators
installed at DWSD after the great blackout in 2003. Our backup
generator runs automatically for half an hour once a week so it is
going to be ready to go if it is needed [[with the caveat that every
once in a great while it won't be ready to go as repairs or maintenance
on it are taking place). So some of your ratepayer dollars go towards
the natural gas for running the generator every week.

[Dumpling]

The Great Lakes Water Authority 2016 Year In Review has recently
been made available.

http://www.glwater.org/wp-content/up...End-Review.pdf

[O3H]

Anyone notice that the INTERCEPTORS
get an AWFUL LOT of rainwater in them ?
All that rainwater gets funnelled into Detroit, along with the sewage.

WHY - when the rainwater could easily go into the Lake St Clair - hmmmmm.

Remember when Candice Miller urged everyone not to flush
during the large storm we had around Superbowl Weekend ?

You don't think it's 11 to 13 ft in diameter for just poop........ did you now ?

https://twitter.com/Willi_H2O/status...596224/photo/1

[Dumpling]

Page 20 of the Year in Review shows that the Northeast Water
Treatment Plant which is on the east side of Detroit, south of
Eight Mile, is intended to be repurposed.

That is, it is most likely not going to be used for water production
any more, as the overall system is considered to have overcapacity.

[O3H]

But, but, but, ....everyone in Detroit wants cheap drinking water !!!!

If there is over - capacity , that drives down price in the marketplace, right ?

[Dumpling]

I haven't taken a look at the Master Plans and really should do that.

Here is my take...in one sense, the present GLWA water system does
have overcapacity. The sizes for the piping and processing and
storage tanks and the total number of fresh water plants means
that we could easily produce enough water for twice the population
that there is now.
Maybe in other ways though we don't have overcapacity. So often over
the last thirty years in the summer ratepayers have been asked to restrict water usage, water lawns every other day, and so on. In these cases
production volume capabilities are not the shortfall - there is still plenty
of raw water, there is plenty of volume capacity, certainly someone could
make sure to have enough chemicals on hand - it is the ability of the
existing pumping and pressure maintaining infrastructure and the existing
electric grid that is coming up short at these times.

In the summer especially Detroit firefighters run into problems with low water pressure when fighting fires. Absolutely I would trade a water treatment plant for enough water towers so as to be able to maintain adequate water distribution system pressure at all times.

[Dumpling]

The Master Plans.

http://www.glwater.org/planning-documents/master-plans/

[O3H]

It's extremely easy for Macomb to merely tap into the northern drinking water

Notice that 72 inch Diameter DWSD water line.....??????

https://redrundrain.files.wordpress....uron-water.jpg

LOTS of water to the north

https://redrundrain.files.wordpress....a-pipeline.jpg

Will the GLWA play hardball with the DWSD over clean water rates ??????

Compare the 2 water supply lines
http://bit.ly/NorthWaterMacomb

I believe many want Detroit city limits to fend for their own, fail on their own.
There has been a massive push to squash the cancer of """free water to all"""
- clean , pressured water, delivered to a personal kitchen sink costs money

[Dumpling]

I am thinking you meant to say, will the GLWA play hardball with the
Karegnondi Water Authority. Or vice versa. Well, if anything happens
to one supply pipe there is a backup pipe.

The Detroit Pension System is that much weaker due to no more
contributions from several hundred active employees employed
with GLWA rather than DWSD as formerly. The active employees
are now contributing to the municipal retirement fund ICMARC
which might be the same one L. Brooks Patterson is in, in any
case it should be fully funded by now. It takes three years to
vest, so any mass layoffs from GLWA would happen in December
2018. Maybe it's not so much that anyone wants Detroit to fail,
they just want Oakland County to do well.

[O3H]

If the EPA and the DEQ fall to the wayside, with limited funding,
do we have to trust the GLWA with zero checks/balances in place ?

[Dumpling]

Keith Matheny has an interesting background article on the Oakland County water main break in the Detroit Free Press:

http://www.freep.com/story/news/loca...ure/800553001/

A current goal of GLWA is to have components of the system being operated remotely as opposed to manually. There may be air or hydraulically controlled remote automatic valve closures in place that need to be changed so that they close more slowly.

Another possible area for improvement would be to have two or
three replacement sections of pipe on hand so that up to three
breaks in a pipe can be repaired right away so that there is
not a delay while the replacement sections are ordered and shipped.

It is good that CEO McCormick is honest about the pipeline not
having been inspected since its installation in 1970 and that an
inspection protocol is currently being developed.

In this case there was apparently a small failure of the electric grid
together with pumping and pressure maintaining infrastructure
which THEN led to the pipeline break. So the electric grid was
actually the initial weak link for this failure, rather than the
non-inspected pipeline, not that not inspecting the pipes for
decades is a good thing.

[O3H]

There is sooo much that needs SCADA .
For years they guess-timated an awful lot and admitted it.

Water is a HUGE necessity to households - yet it is severely UNDERfunded

People need to re-think priorities.
You cannot drink a Tweet, swallow a gallon of Gasoline,
quench your thirst with Comcast, or flush your toilet with Cigarettes.
Drinkable Water comes first, everything else is secondary.
Think about it all for a second. Let’s stop the bullshit

For far tooooo long, the use of traditional instruments such
as mechanical meters, venturis, orifice systems, differential
pressure transmitters, sonic meters, magnetic flowmeters and
chart recorders dominated.
The existing metering facilities used no electronics
with the mechanical meters, and all other instruments
used chart recorders and mechanical pulse totalizers.

DWSD and GLWA guessed at an awful lot of stuff.

[Jimaz]

...In this case there was apparently a small failure of the electric grid together with pumping and pressure maintaining infrastructure which THEN led to the pipeline break. So the electric grid was actually the initial weak link for this failure, rather than the non-inspected pipeline, not that not inspecting the pipes for decades is a good thing.

That matches the analysis I heard early on [[probably on WWJ radio). I recall being surprised that that much detail could be released so soon.

So if we step back and consider the system as a whole, it appears the system broke itself — not a very good design.

A lesson to be learned, I suppose.

[lpg]

Out of sight-out of mind....Till it doesn't work anymore.

[Dumpling]

There was an uptick in Legionnaires' cases in Southeast Michigan that was noted last August:

http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/in...nnaires_d.html

A few days ago there was a Detroit News article on lead levels in children in Detroit. The housing stock that contains lead is undoubtedly one cause of the higher lead levels but might not fully explain an increase from 7.5 micrograms/deciLiter in 2015 to 8.8 mcg/dL in 2016. To be sure I don't know the statistics involved at arriving at this increase. For all I know it is only an apparent increase due to sampling uncertainties.


http://www.detroitnews.com/story/new...oit/107683688/

Supposing that the increase is real and not due to statistical
uncertainty, why would it be there?

If one takes the Legionnaires' increase as having some
SINGLE underlying cause - thank you for letting the researchers have
the million dollar budgets to sort out if there is one underlying
cause or not - the cause could possibly be the drinking water,
for a similar situation as with the Flint water - costs of
treatment chemicals were conserved, only the results are not
as severe.

Since the incomes and wealth of remaining long term Detroiters
have not been increasing it can be concluded that the water is
not the problem, it is the poorer, cheaper diets obtainable with
lower incomes and lower wealth that are the problem.

The drainage fees to be implemented within Detroit by next
year will not be helpful for this population. If it is desired to
improve the drainage infrastructure in metro Detroit, the
funding would preferably be from state level budget processes
same as for MDOT infrastructure with Federal grants and
loans as necessary.

[Daveanzio]

GLWA spent $30 million to complete 90% of a necessary back up primary power sub station 6 years ago, fired Weiss construction without cause and abandoned the Project known as the 3rd Feeder. The WWTP had a primary power failure in 2011 and again in 2017. The 2017 repairs lasted nearly six months with temporary generator rental fees of almost $1 Million per month. The never used electrical station warranty has expired. The completed 3rd Feeder would have precluded the need for temporary generators. What's next? Finish the last 10% of the 3rd Feeder. OR is the GLWA up to the old tricks of the DWSD? $30,000,000.00 is big bundle of money to walk away from. By comparison,The NAFCO deal, over 20 times the size of the 3rd Feeder was started 6 years ago and completed in 32 months.

[Daveanzio]

http://voiceofdetroit.net/2017/08/18...d-with-sewage/
Above is a ink to a more comprehensive news article on the 3rd Feeder.