Municipal Water Leader September 2019

Volume 6 Issue 8

September 2019

Bay County, Florida: Restoring Water Service After a Devastating Hurricane

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Municipal Water Leader is published 10 times a year with combined issues for May/June and November/December by

STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Nicole E. Venable, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer

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Restoring Service After a Devastating Hurricane

Contents

September 2019 Volume 6, Issue 8 5 Hurricane Response and Recovery

By Kris Polly 6 Bay County, Florida: Restoring Water Services After a Devastating Hurricane 14 Recovering and Rebuilding After Hurricane Katrina 20 How New York City Is Learning From Hurricane Sandy

28 Green Water Infrastructure for Chicago 32 How Municipal Water Districts Can Work With FEMA 36 How IPM Can Help Water Utilities With Personal Transitions

THE INNOVATORS

24 Fighting Floodwater in Arkansas

Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

4 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com.

ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts one-quarter, half-page, and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to irrigation district managers and boards of directors in the 17 western states, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials, members of Congress and committee staff, and advertising sponsors.

For address corrections or additions, please contact our managing editor, Joshua Dill, at joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright Š 2019 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised.

MunicipalWaterLeader.com MuniWaterLeader @Irrigation_Leader

COVER PHOTO:

Left to right: Bobby Gibbs, Bay County Water Division Superintendent; Trevor Noble, Bay County Utility Assistant Director; Benjamin Blitch, Bay County Utility Director.

Photo courtesy of Bay County.

PHOTO COURTESY OF BAY COUNTY.

Coming soon in Municipal Water Leader: October: Water Reuse November/December: Asset Management

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or

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Hurricane Response and Recovery

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n this month’s issue of Municipal Water Leader, we bring you the stories of municipal water providers and managers facing the devastating storm surge, winds, and rains that are brought by major hurricanes and other natural disasters.

Our cover story brings you the story of Bay County, Florida, which was hit by the unexpectedly serious Hurricane Michael in October 2018. The category 5 storm knocked out power, blocked roads, and wreaked catastrophic damage on facilities of the Bay County Water Division, the county’s water wholesaler. Nevertheless, within 8 days, water was available at all the system’s points of delivery.

We also report on how two cities are updating their systems after historic hurricanes of recent decades.

Col. Michael Clancy of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District tells us about the massive storm defenses that have been built around the Big Easy since Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005, and staff from the New York City Department of Environmental Protection tell us about the updates they have implemented to their wastewater treatment systems since Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Arkansas experienced serious river flooding earlier this year. Director A.J. Gary of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management tells us about how his agency prepared for and responded to this natural disaster.

Commissioner Randy Conner of the Chicago Department of Water Management tells us about his agency’s current

By Kris Polly

priorities, including conservation efforts and environmental initiatives.

Finally, Tim Pickering tells us about his company, Interim Public Management, which provides interim managers and executive-level staff for agencies like municipal water districts that are searching for permanent candidates to fill those positions.

Water is a necessity, and not even a hurricane can be allowed to cut off drinking water and wastewater services.

The water managers and other professionals we interview this month have faced down enormous natural disasters and kept the citizens of their cities provided with vital services. In reading about how they managed to do this, I hope you gain new knowledge and an even greater respect for this country’s water professionals. M

Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and president of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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Bay County, Florida: Restoring Service After a Devastating Hurricane

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The JEA power utility's recovery team staging area.

n October 2018, Hurricane Michael, a category 5 storm, made landfall at Bay County, Florida, with devastating impact. The storm surge, winds, and rain destroyed property and endangered human life. The effects on Bay County’s water infrastructure were also serious. A water main was ruptured, commercial power was knocked out, cell phone service was disabled, roads were blocked, and municipal buildings were damaged. Nevertheless, within 7 days, Bay County was able to resume its wholesale water service to all points of delivery.

In this interview, Benjamin Blitch, the Bay County utility director, Trevor Noble, the Bay County utility assistant director, and Bobby Gibbs, the Bay County Water Division superintendent, speak with Municipal Water Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about the experience of recovering from Hurricane Michael and the lessons the county agencies have learned from it.

to the Florida DEP in 2013 to serve as the source and drinking water program administrator. In 2015, I took a position as the public works director for the City of Callaway. In 2016, I came over to Bay County as assistant utility director.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about your backgrounds and how you came to be in your current positions.

Kris Polly: Please tell us about Bay County’s Water Division.

Benjamin Blitch: I’m a professional engineer. I graduated from Florida State University (FSU) in 2005. I worked for a private engineering company for 10 years or so before going to the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) in 2013 to serve as the assistant director of the Northwest District. In 2015, I left the DEP to take the position of Bay County utility director.

Trevor Noble: We own and operate the only surface water plant in the county. We provide water wholesale to seven municipalities and one air force base. Out of the seven municipalities, Lynn Haven is the only one that produces water. They have a well system that provides approximately 80 percent of their water demand; the county supplies the remaining 20 percent. We are the sole water source for unincorporated Bay County, Callaway, Mexico Beach, Panama City, Panama City Beach, Parker, Springfield, and Tyndall Air Force Base. We serve approximately 150,000 citizens.

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF BAY COUNTY.

Trevor Noble: I have had a pretty similar path. I graduated with an engineering degree from FSU in 2008 and worked for a private engineering firm for 8 years before going

Bobby Gibbs: I started working in the water industry in 1977. I started as a maintenance mechanic at a water treatment plant in Louisiana. After 2 years, I took a position as a plant operator, which I remained in for over 20 years. I later took the lab manager position before taking the superintendent position. I retired in 2009 after 33 years and moved to Florida. However, my retirement was short. I began working for Bay County as chief operator in 2010 and became water division superintendent in 2015.

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Bobby Gibbs: As Trevor mentioned, our plant is a surface water plant, one of only a few in the state of Florida.

Bay County’s water source is the Deer Point Reservoir, a spring-fed reservoir created by the Florida legislature in 1961. The system has two raw water pump stations with a pumping capacity of approximately 75 million gallons per day (MGD) and a treatment plant designed to handle 60 MGD. The distribution system comprises approximately 575 miles of pipe with 74 points of delivery to service our wholesale customers.

Kris Polly: Would you tell us about your experience during Hurricane Michael?

Trevor Noble: During a hurricane, our tier 1 employees, who comprise 70–80 percent of our staff, stay onsite at the plant or at one of our other facilities. They include water and wastewater operators, maintenance and instrument and electrical (I&E) technicians, and distribution and collection technicians. After the storm, all of those employees are ready to respond. When the storm hit, Ben and I were stationed at the emergency operations center (EOC). The EOC is where core county leadership responds during emergencies. The staff, including Bobby and the other supervisors and superintendents, were at their respective plants.

On Wednesday, October 10, around 10:00 a.m., the weather took a turn for the worse. That lasted until about

3:30 or 4:00 p.m. However, at 12:30 p.m., as we were trying to maintain flows to the transmission mains, we started experiencing very high demand, which we were unable to meet. This led us to believe that there was a massive leak or break somewhere. Our operators made the decision to shut down our high-service pumps, resulting in a loss of pressure in our transmission mains. At that point, everyone just buckled down and waited for the storm to pass. Once the storm receded, the guys were able to begin assessing the damage and identifying what worked and what didn’t.

I’ll tell you that there was more of the latter! Debris and downed trees impeded our ability to access our remote sites, but armed with chainsaws and heavy equipment and aided by the National Guard, our employees were able to get to our high-priority sites within hours.

We had not understood how vulnerable our buildings were. During Hurricane Michael, about 90 percent of our buildings suffered substantial damage. Luckily, no one was injured, but we did have a few close calls. Most of our buildings protect critical equipment, like generators and switchgears, and our operations building houses our supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) computers along with other critical equipment. You can imagine the challenges of losing commercial power, suffering damage to our generators and switchgears, and losing SCADA controls. We are proud of how quickly our guys were able to adapt and respond. This leads me to the most important lesson we learned: You have to trust your

Bay County Water Treatment Plant's Operations Control Room after Hurricane Michael.

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staff development and trust that you have the right people in the right positions and then turn them loose to do what they need to do. There is no way you can micromanage a situation like a hurricane. I think that is why we were so successful. We have a highly engaged staff, from top to bottom. They all know what needs to be done, and they just do it.

Benjamin Blitch: As Trevor mentioned, our buildings and roofs sustained catastrophic damage, especially the main plant operations building. Once the operations supervisor made the decision to shut the plant down at 12:30, everyone moved to an interior office for next couple of hours. Immediately after the storm, the operators and the I&E team were able to move several laptop computers into the administrative building and within hours set up plant operations in Mr. Gibbs’s office.

Trevor Noble: One major challenge was communication.

During the storm, we lost all cell service. I was not able to communicate with anybody at the plant—in fact, I was only able to communicate with people face to face. In response, we developed a runner system. People would come to see me at the EOC in the morning and I would give them information to take to the water plant. However, what was normally a 20-minute trip to the water plant took 3–4 hours because of traffic, fallen trees, and road and bridge closures. There was a constant flow of runners to and from the EOC, taking messages elsewhere and returning to brief us. It was archaic and extremely challenging. Our I&E folks were able to get our

800-megahertz radios up and running on the second day, which helped overcome the communication shortfall.

Bobby Gibbs: Losing the ability to contact staff and know whether they were safe was troubling. Once the worst of the storm had passed, each group made it outside and began checking in with the other staff members onsite. To our surprise and relief, there were no injuries. However, extensive damage could be seen everywhere. Our staff quickly put together groups to do specific tasks, including checking the water system equipment, clearing roadways of debris, repairing roofs, and checking on our staff members’ families. Because a category 5 hurricane was not expected, most of our staff had family members who had stayed in their homes.

Trevor Noble: As we completed our initial facilities inspections and realized that our lower pumping station would be out of commission for several days, we moved to our northern pump station, which is located along a spring-fed creek in a rural part of the county. The National Guard cleared miles of roadway to help us gain access to it.

We also had staff helping with bulldozers and chainsaws.

Fortunately, the pumps just needed to be reset. The generators were on and the pump station didn’t appear to be damaged. We were able to reset the pumps and start pumping raw water at about 11:30 p.m. on Thursday.

We were sending water to the treatment facility within 36 hours.

In the meantime, our operators, I&E technicians, and maintenance staff were inspecting the chemical pumps

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF BAY COUNTY.

Damage to the water treatment plant, seen from above.

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and electrical buildings at the plant and trying to keep the generators working, since there was no commercial power.

They took that 36-hour window to make sure that once we got raw water, our treatment facilities were ready to go. It was an amazing feat, considering the challenges they were faced with.

Our generators have a limited fuel capacity, and some of our facilities needed to be refueled daily. We relied on our county resources, specifically Lieutenant Ben Collier of the Bay County Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services, to make sure our facilities were refueled and operational. It helped that we had the burn rates and knew how long we could expect our fuel stores to last.

When you lose commercial power, the switchgear automatically switches to generator power. The roof of the electrical room took quite a bit of damage, and there was water leaking on the switchgear. We had to get drying units in there and dry it out so that it would be safe to manually flip the switch. Commercial power was restored on October 28.

As far as responding to our challenges within the water distribution system, there’s an organization called Florida’s Water/Wastewater Agency Response Network, known as FlaWARN, which is a formalized system of utilities helping other utilities during emergency situations. By Sunday, we had a total of 60 people from 7 different utilities at our disposal to help us with our distribution system.

Our system has three large transmission mains that supply 74 points of delivery. Our crews had to reach and isolate all 74 valves before we could pressurize and test those lines to make sure we were capable of delivering water to our wholesale customers. That took 2 days. We then had to systematically go through our retail distribution system, opening it up a little bit at a time, and identifying and fixing leaks. The valves are located in boxes next to the road, and we had to move fallen trees and debris with bulldozers and heavy equipment to reach them. We completed the review of our distribution system on Thursday evening, meaning that within 8 days, we had evaluated our entire transmission and distribution systems, identifying and fixing hundreds of leaks. Most of the leaks were small, but one 16-inch transmission main within Mexico Beach’s infrastructure had ruptured. That was likely the cause of the large increase in our demand during the storm.

Benjamin Blitch: As a result of the knowledge, dedication, and personal sacrifice of the entire utility department, treated water was available to all the wholesale system’s points of delivery in 8 days. It is important to recognize the personal sacrifice of the entire team. Everyone’s homes were damaged; many suffered total losses. With cell service out, we were unable to communicate with our families. Despite all that, everyone’s primary goal was to restore water to the citizens of Bay County, and they did so in fine form.

Kris Polly: Were there any concerns about drinking water contamination?

Bobby Gibbs: Yes. The day of the storm, Bay County issued a precautionary boil water notice from the county’s EOC using the Alert Bay notification system. We had never shut down our facility completely before, but pressure issues caused by Hurricane Michael left us no choice. The plant’s generators had been on for 3 days with minimal problems, but when we tried starting the plant, they began experiencing multiple issues, resulting in an inconsistent power feed that caused the plant to shut down repeatedly.

This caused numerous chemical-feed issues that resulted in a treatment-technique excursion in turbidity that lasted approximately 6 hours. Since we were already under a boil water notice, this was not a big concern. Our biggest concern was refilling the plant storage tanks and making sure water would be available once the pumps were ready to go.

Kris Polly: What ongoing recovery efforts is the division engaged in today?

Williams Bayou pump station was affected by storm surge. Tarps were put on it to keep rain from causing further damage to electrical equipment.

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Wind and rain lash Bay County's buildings.

Trevor Noble: Fifteen days or so after the storm, we reached out to an engineering firm, Carollo Engineers, to discuss a poststorm damage assessment. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and the Florida DEP all had boots on the ground right after the storm. Since Ben and I come from the regulatory world, we felt it was necessary for them to be at the EOC with us to see what we were doing and to make sure we were taking the appropriate measures. Getting Carollo Engineers involved shortly after allowed us to hit the ground running on the damage assessments of our plants and infrastructure. They’re currently wrapping up the assessment of one of our wastewater plants. In the meantime, we’re fixing things as needed. For all intents and purposes, it has been business as usual ever since we rescinded the boil water notice.

Kris Polly: Would you tell us a bit more about your plans to protect against future hurricanes and storms?

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Bobby Gibbs: Every year, at the beginning of the hurricane season on June 1, all our staff have to read and sign our emergency response plan. That plan contains all the preparations that are needed if we have a named storm.

There are checklists of all the things that have to be done 72, 48, and 24 hours before the storm hits. The plan is pretty extensive, and for the most part, we haven’t identified too many holes in it.

However, none of us had ever been through anything like Hurricane Michael, and it brought to our attention some gaps in our pre- and poststorm response plans. We now know what to expect from a category 5 hurricane. Our staff ended up being onsite for 7–8 days without any way to wash their clothes or take showers. We did not have bottled water. We thought that since we were at a water plant we would have plenty of water, but that was not the case.

During this year’s hurricane meeting, our staff decided to acquire plenty of ready-to-eat meals, bottled water, a stocked refrigerator and freezer, a washer and dryer, and additional cots.

Trevor Noble: As we redesign our buildings, we will be contracting with an architect to help us design our

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BAY COUNTY.

Trevor Noble: We are hardening our infrastructure. To give one example, as we repair the buildings that were damaged, we are hardening them to the standard of the Miami-Dade code, which requires that buildings be able to withstand winds of 184 miles per hour. We could have just thrown the roofs back on, but our analysis indicated that bringing our buildings up to the Miami-Dade code would

cost only 5–15 percent more. It was a no brainer, especially since those buildings house staff, generators, electrical switchgears, and other critical equipment.

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The water treatment plant after Hurricane Michael, with storm-ravaged trees in the background.

operations building at the water plant to include kitchens, a laundry facility, and rooms with bunk beds or Murphy beds.

It is important to be prepared for losing your computer.

Our computers’ geographic information system program had all our valve locations, manholes, pipe sizes, and other information about our infrastructure. Without the computers, we had to work off of our staff ’s knowledge.

We’re going to be making PDF maps, lists of vendor contacts, and other information to be put on thumb drives so that we can have access to it if we lose our computers in the future.

Bobby Gibbs: With the changes we have made to our prestorm and poststorm plans, our staff is better prepared this hurricane season. Bay County’s staff demonstrated great teamwork during Hurricane Michael, and we are confident in our abilities to handle future storm events. M

Kris Polly: What is your vision for the future?

Trevor Noble: In my perspective, the future is bright.

We’re storm tested now, and we know what areas need to be fine tuned. There is a lot of communication within our leadership team about what we need to do to move forward.

We have the utmost confidence in our staff. We tell our guys all the time that we are a resource for them. If they tell us what they need, we will get it for them. That’s basically how it happened. Bobby was one of the main leaders here at the plant running the show, along with Robert Hall, our maintenance superintendent. As they identified needs, they submitted requests to Ben and me at the EOC to fulfill. I am more confident than ever moving forward.

Benjamin Blitch is the Bay County utility director. He can be contacted at bblitch@baycountyfl.gov or at (850) 248-5021.

Trevor Noble is the Bay County utility assistant director. He can be contacted at tnoble@baycountyfl.gov or at (850) 248-2034. Bobby Gibbs is the Bay County Water Division superintendent. He can be contacted at bgibbs@baycountyfl.gov or at (850) 248-5029.

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Recovering and Rebuilding After Hurricane Katrina

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This levee east of New Orleans forms part of the Hurricane Storm Damage and Risk Reduction System.

he U.S. Army Corps of Engineers New Orleans District is responsible for maintaining navigation, reducing flood risks, and restoring ecosystems in the distinctive landscape of southern Louisiana. With the mighty Mississippi and its yearly floods on one side and the Gulf of Mexico with its hurricanes on the other, New Orleans faces special challenges.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the New Orleans District played a central role in the city’s recovery and in the rebuilding of its levees and storm defenses.

In this interview, Colonel Michael Clancy, who served as district commander of the New Orleans District from June 2016 to June 2019, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how the Corps handles the constant work required to maintain public safety in southern Louisiana.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Joshua Dill: What are the responsibilities of the New Orleans District commander?

Michael Clancy: As New Orleans District commander, I was responsible for the civil works program in southern Louisiana. Through the civil works program, the army is the nation’s primary water resource agency. The program’s main components nationwide are navigation, flood risk management, and ecosystem restoration. Other missions include hydropower, water supply, recreation, and the regulatory program.

The Corps’s district boundaries follow watershed lines, unlike those of other federal agencies. The New Orleans District area of responsibility is approximately 30,000 square miles and includes everything between the Sabine River, which is the border of Louisiana and Texas, the Pearl River, which is the border of Louisiana and Mississippi, and the Red River, which slices across northern Louisiana.

Every district is a little bit different based on its geography, but in the New Orleans District, my three main responsibilities were navigation, flood risk reduction, and ecosystem restoration. I was responsible for maintaining about 2,000 miles of federally authorized navigation channels. When it comes to flood risk reduction and flood control, the district deals with hurricane exposure as well as the yearly spring floods on the Mississippi River. Between river levees and hurricane levees, I was responsible for

PHOTOS COURTESY OF U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS.

Michael Clancy: I am an officer in the U.S. Army. I am a graduate of the United States Military Academy at West Point and was commissioned in the Corps of Engineers.

I have spent most of my career in doing regular army stuff—serving in infantry brigades and other things people see in movies—but I’m also a civil engineer. I have a civil engineering master’s degree and a professional engineer license as a civil engineer. This is my third assignment in the Corps. I have had two assignments in the New York District and also spent 6 months in the Gulf Region Central District in Baghdad. The Corps of Engineers is a branch of the Army, but it is 99 percent civilian. There are just under 1,100 employees in the New Orleans District,

only 6 of whom are in uniform. Most Corps districts are commanded by a colonel in the army. I was promoted to the rank of colonel and selected to be the commander assigned to the New Orleans District.

the maintenance of about 1,400 miles of levees. As for ecosystem restoration, the district is partnering with the State of Louisiana to rebuild the wetlands that have been lost across coastal Louisiana. As much as possible, it tries to beneficially use the dredge material produced during channel maintenance. That material can be put on land or used to rebuild wetlands. There is also the Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection, and Restoration Act (CWPPRA) task force, of which I was the chairman. It consists of five federal agencies and the State of Louisiana. CWPPRA constructs a handful of projects every year, totaling about $80 million annually in coastal wetland restoration projects.

I’m sure your readers are familiar with getting a Corps permit. Technically, if you are going to build anything in the waters of the United States, you need a permit from the U.S. Army. I administered that for coastal Louisiana, which has a tremendous amount of wetlands. Our regulatory actions include granting various types of permits and jurisdictional determinations. We do about 8,000 regulatory actions a year.

My work also included the operations and maintenance of existing structures and the construction of new ones. That process kicks off with a feasibility study process in which we analyze the problem and submit recommendations to Congress for authorization and funding. There are about a half dozen feasibility studies in the works right now, mostly flood risk management related. Several authorized projects are now in the budget process. Last year, Congress passed the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, which responded to a terrible natural disaster season with multiple hurricanes, wildfires, mudslides, and river floods. It appropriated the New Orleans District about $2 billion in new construction money that will be used to evaluate and construct new flood risk management projects and to repair and reset existing federal projects that were affected by the recent river and tropical events.

Joshua Dill: Does the Corps work with any other agencies?

Michael Clancy: Everything we do is a team effort. Almost every Corps effort requires a nonfederal sponsor like the state or one of the levee districts that are responsible for levees throughout Louisiana. Most civil works projects are cost shared; the typical breakdown is 65 percent federal and 35 percent local. Nonfederal entities sponsor the projects and pay roughly a third of the costs. When we complete them, we turn them over to the nonfederal sponsors to own and operate.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about how the New Orleans District worked to recover from Hurricane Katrina and protect against future hurricanes.

The Mississippi River flows through the newly opened Bonnet Carre Spillway, February 2019.

Michael Clancy: After Hurricane Katrina, Congress made a national commitment to the recovery and resilience of southeastern Louisiana.. The New Orleans District got $14.6 billion to upgrade the flood and hurricane defenses of the Greater New Orleans area. In effect, we built a 130-mile wall—either levees or concrete flood walls, depending on the location—that surrounds five parishes in the Greater New Orleans area. That is called the Hurricane Storm Damage and Risk Reduction System (HSDRRS).

Our immediate goal was to make repairs as quickly as possible to the system that existed before Hurricane Katrina. Those were done about a year after the storm.

Our next goal was to build new stuff. We set ourselves a goal, which we accomplished, of building levees and walls to defend against the 1 percent, or 100-year, storm. This system was able to defend against a 100-year event by the 2011 hurricane season.

The environmental process followed by the HSDRRS program was unusual. We followed alternative National Environmental Policy Act regulations. Typically, an organization has to do an environmental impact statement, get all its permits before the project starts, and do mitigation concurrent with the project. In this case, the MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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A closure and pump structure at the mouth of the 17th Street Canal in New Orleans.

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up in the canal, and the pumps pump the water out of the canals into Lake Pontchartrain.

About 50 percent of New Orleans is below sea level. It’s a giant bowl. Most places in the world are drained by gravity— not New Orleans. Every bit of water has to be moved mechanically. The local sewer and water board is responsible for that system. After Katrina, we helped improve the interior drainage of Orleans and Jefferson Parishes through the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project, known as SELA. Joshua Dill: What was the most challenging part of hurricane recovery?

Michael Clancy: I was not here at the time, but from what my colleagues tell me, the most challenging part was just scaling up the program. Everyone wanted to recover from Katrina and get the city back on its feet so that the citizens would have the confidence that we could make it through another major hurricane. It was a tremendous amount of work. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of contracts going at the same time and multiple contractors working on each site. In 2010, our peak year of construction, it is estimated that nearly 60,000 people were a part of the overall construction effort.

All the employees of the New Orleans District are from the area, so many of my employees were personally affected: Their homes were flooded and they lost everything. Not only were they trying to recover in their personal lives, they were working 7-day weeks to get all the work done that we needed to do to recover from the storm.

Joshua Dill: How did the Corps incorporate new techniques and technologies into the flood control infrastructure after Katrina?

Michael Clancy: After Katrina, the Interagency Performance Evaluation Taskforce studied what had happened in Katrina,

PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS.

need and the urgency were so great that we built all the projects first and did the environmental compliance on the back end. That’s what is left to do today. Most of that is mitigation work—it’ll be the last thing we finish.

In the race to get the 1-percent system in place by 2011, we carried out some interim measures. We built some pump stations, for instance, that were out of doors and had no roof. We went back after 2011 and built more permanent structures. Something similar was true of the levees.

Earthen levees are essentially just piles of clay, and they are constantly consolidating, or sinking. They need levee lifts on a routine basis, roughly once a decade. Over the last 2–3 years, we have been going back in partnership with the local levee districts to do levee lifts on the levees we built in the race to 2011 and to armor them. The armoring is a geotextile mesh net that goes over the top of the levee. We plant grass over that to bind it to the levee. That is so that if the levee is overtopped by storm surge, the water will simply flow over the top of the levee without eroding it or scouring it out. Although we were authorized and funded

by Congress to build the defenses for the 1 percent storm, the system is designed to deal with a storm bigger than that. We learned many lessons from Hurricane Katrina, one being to build levees that are that are capable of being overtopped. The transition zones where earthen levees meet concrete sea walls could be weak points, but ours have been deliberately designed so that there is no weakness: The wall ties into the earthen levees wherever there is a transition, similar to the armoring on the earthen levees. The concrete walls have splash pads on the back so that if they are ever overtopped, the water will land on the concrete pad and not cause any erosion.

New Orleans is distinctive in its topography. It is crisscrossed by a series of outfall canals, which drain rainfall and water of every kind from the city. We cap them where they meet Lake Pontchartrain with massive gates and pump stations. We can close the gates so that the surge can’t back

ADVERTISEMENT particularly the mechanisms of failure wherever flood walls had failed. Those lessons informed all the work that has been done since. First, everything is bigger than what was there before Katrina. That concept is simple, of course, but building massive levees and walls takes a lot of geotechnical finesse. New Orleans is a tough place in which to build because most of the area is reclaimed wetlands. Some of our walls have massive piles that go hundreds of feet deep.

We also incorporated all the stuff I mentioned: capping the outfall canals, levee armoring, splash pads. It’s a much more sophisticated and well-designed system than what existed for Hurricane Katrina.

Joshua Dill: Does your ecosystem restoration relate to your flood control work?

Michael Clancy: It does—it’s all interrelated. The topography here in southern Louisiana is interesting. The Mississippi River built all this land. It is the youngest land in North America: The ground under New Orleans is only 5,000–8,000 years old. Along the last few hundred miles of the Mississippi before it reaches the Gulf, there is a series of transitions from freshwater marsh to intermediate marsh, saltmarsh, and the open Gulf. Marshes are a transition zone, and in effect serve as Mother Nature’s storm defenses.

We have the largest wetlands in the United States here in Louisiana, and in addition to being important from a natural and wildlife perspective, they are a component of our flood defenses. A general rule of thumb is that every mile of wetlands reduces storm surge by about a foot. A 20-foot hurricane surge would be eliminated entirely by 20 miles of marsh.

However, Louisiana has lost a tremendous amount of marsh over the last hundred years for a variety of reasons.

One is that the Mississippi River is now confined by levees, so it does not overtop every year, flooding the land and depositing new sediment. Another big reason is that the coast was chopped to pieces in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s for oil exploration, drilling, and pipelines. As the marsh was cut by canals, saltwater intruded and destroyed the marsh. The transition zone that I mentioned is a delicate ecosystem.

Freshwater marshes, brackish marshes, and cypress swamps are all sensitive to salt. It will take a lot of work to recover from these changes. The State of Louisiana is taking the lead on that with its Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, though the Corps assists it wherever and however it can; at the least we have to do the permits on their work.

Joshua Dill: What is the district’s vision for the future?

Michael Clancy: Our vision for the future is to keep pushing forward. HSDRRS got a huge flood of money after Katrina.

We’re doing refinements like levee lifts and armoring, but we’re also doing two feasibility studies, one on each bank of the river, to decide what the future of the system should be as

and what the long-term federal responsibility should be. We’re building about 18 miles of newly funded levee north of New Orleans on the west shore of Lake Pontchartrain. We are also doing a lot of work in the Baton Rouge area. Baton Rouge had horrific flooding in August 2016. We’ve got $1.5 billion to address that. We are going to build a diversion canal for the Comite River, which goes through Baton Rouge, to divert part of it into the Mississippi River when it floods and to clean out other drainage ditches in East Baton Rouge Parish.

New Orleans just celebrated its 300th anniversary. The first French colonials started building their settlements there in 1718, and when everything flooded when the river came up in spring 1719, they started building levees. For 300 years, the people of southern Louisiana have been working on the levees. Back then it was the local government; the federal government got involved after the 1927 flood. It is a neverending process that evolves as environmental conditions and the local topography change under the influence of the river or hurricanes. It is a cycle of reworking, redoing, improving, and incorporating new information and new technologies.

Joshua Dill: What are current conditions on the Mississippi like?

Michael Clancy: We are currently experiencing the longest flood in the history of the Mississippi River. We have surpassed the 1973 flood, the former record holder, which was at flood stage for 225 days. While folks who don’t live here usually associate New Orleans with hurricanes, the biggest flood risk we face on a regular basis is the Mississippi River.

The Corps has been working on the Mississippi River levees for about 90 years, since the Flood Control Act of 1928. Just like the work on the hurricane system, it is a never-ending process of levee lifts and improvements. It is truly remarkable that we are in the middle of the biggest flood in the history of Mississippi River, and nothing that’s not designed to be flooded is flooded right now. There’s no loss of life or major loss of property. All the levees are in good shape even after months and months of pressure from the river. That is a testament to the great work we’ve done over the years. M

Colonel Michael Clancy is the former district commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ New Orleans District. He can be contacted at michael.n.clancy.mil@mail.mil.

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How New York City Is Learning From Hurricane Sandy

Flooding near the Rockaway wastewater treatment plant.

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n October 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City. It was the most serious hurricane to hit New York in many years, flooding large parts of the city, damaging buildings and roads, and knocking out power. The hurricane posed significant challenges to New York’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), particularly to its wastewater treatment infrastructure. Many of its wastewater resource recovery facilities and pump stations lost power or were damaged by the storm surge.

DEP’s Alan Cohn, the managing director for integrated water management, Colin Johnson, an account manager with the capital construction bureau, and Tara Deighan, a deputy press secretary, speak with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about DEP’s response to Hurricane Sandy and its planning for future extreme weather events 50 or 100 years into the future.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about DEP and its services.

Joshua Dill: Would you give us an overview of DEP’s wastewater infrastructure?

Tara Deighan: We have 14 wastewater resource recovery facilities and 96 pump stations across the 5 boroughs. We

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Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about your experience during Hurricane Sandy and its effects on the wastewater system?

Colin Johnson: Ten of our 14 treatment plants and 42 of our 96 pump stations were adversely affected in some way by the storm, whether they were flooded, suffered power outages, or something else.

Alan Cohn: We fared relatively well compared to some neighboring municipalities. Bay Park Sewage Treatment Plant on Long Island and Passaic Valley in New Jersey were down for several weeks. Our longest outage was the Rockaway plant on the Rockaway Peninsula, which was down for 3 days. That is the smallest of our 14 treatment plants, so we fared relatively well.

Those outages resulted in raw or partially treated sewage being discharged into the harbor from those treatment

PHOTO COURTESY OF NYC WATER.

Tara Deighan: DEP’s primary objective is to provide 9.6 million New Yorkers with clean drinking water. We also treat 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater every day. In addition to that, we try to mitigate hazardous air and noise pollution.

treat 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater on a dry day and can handle double that capacity during a wet weather event.

We have about 7,500 miles of sewers that deliver that wastewater to our plants.

Rather than simply treating that wastewater and dumping it into the harbor, we are trying to recover resources from it. There are actually various usable resources that result from the treatment process, including biosolids, methane gas, and of course clean water, which is treated to be biologically similar to the water body it is going out into.

We are seeing this trend on the national level as well: not just treating wastewater, but recovering resources from it.

ADVERTISEMENT plants. Millions of gallons of untreated and diluted sewage was mixed with the storm water that spilled into waterways across the city via our outfalls throughout the harbor.

Tara Deighan: Luckily, because we avoided catastrophic failures, we were able to put all our plants back online quickly and avoided more of that occurring. I believe the estimated damage to DEP’s infrastructure was $100 million. We had staffers working around the clock, not just in our treatment plants, but going around the city investigating flooding conditions, pumping out basements, and helping to clear downed power lines and trees. It was an all-hands-on-deck effort. For a little perspective, of our 6,000 employees, roughly 1,100 live in a flood zone. Many people still made it to work and jumped into action.

Joshua Dill: Why was untreated sewage discharged into the water? Was it because the sewer capacity was overwhelmed?

Alan Cohn: That was part of it. Another reason was the loss of power.

Colin Johnson: The unprecedented nature of the storm was the main cause of it. The loss of power, flooding, and hurricane conditions that our facilities faced overwhelmed a lot of them.

Tara Deighan: Our facilities, obviously, are located along the coastline, and the biggest issue with Hurricane Sandy was the storm surge. That is why this hurricane affected the wastewater infrastructure and not our drinking water infrastructure, which is located over 100 miles away. Other hurricanes, like Hurricane Irene, caused heavy rainfall in our watershed, which affected the drinking water infrastructure more directly.

Joshua Dill: What did DEP learn from this experience, and what things will it incorporate into its plans for future storms?

Colin Johnson: The main thing we learned was how vulnerable the facilities are. Out of necessity, they’re located in low-lying areas near the coastline. This is probably the first major hurricane to hit New York City in 50–60 years, so a lot of these facilities were built, quite frankly, without a hurricane being taken into consideration. It was an expensive wake-up call—$100 million is nothing to ignore.

We will be implementing measures to better protect these facilities in future events.

Alan Cohn: We were also made aware of our vulnerability to climate change. When Sandy hit, we were already doing a study of one of our treatment plants’ sensitivity to sea level rise, increasing rainfall, and storm surge. We were able to

quickly mobilize what we learned from that study and apply it to all 14 treatment plants and about 60 percent of our pumping stations, which we found to be at risk of future flooding from storm surge and sea level rise. One of the lessons we learned from Sandy was that these effects are potentially more immediate than we thought. We wanted to make sure that we focused not just on how to repair our damaged facilities but on what we need to do to harden our facilities against future events.

Joshua Dill: After the initial experience in response to the storm, what kind of recovery and resiliency efforts did the department undertake?

Alan Cohn: Our main action was developing a wastewater resiliency plan, essentially a flooding audit. First, we did an initial screening. We looked at the future floodplains depicted on the new interim flood maps released right after Hurricane Sandy. This was the first time they had been revised since 1983. That screening analysis helped us see what was potentially at risk in the future. Then we deployed people to each of the facilities and looked at everything that was below flooding elevation. We also looked at flooding pathways. Water can get in through grates or tunnels and in all sorts of other ways. Even if an asset isn’t at risk from direct inundation, there might be other ways for water to get to it. Most of the projects that were already in progress or being designed prior to Sandy were reevaluated and redesigned to implement resiliency features.

Colin Johnson: The agency also implemented guidelines mandating that all new construction must take into account design flood elevations and the vulnerability of equipment to flooding.

Joshua Dill: Were there other major infrastructure projects that you did in response to the hurricane?

Alan Cohn: We coordinate with other coastal protection efforts in making sure that our infrastructure is integrated with those larger projects, but most of the agency’s projects are focused on what we can do to individual assets.

Tara Deighan: We are looking at how we can be more proactive in the face of climate change, which will have effects that go beyond just the storm surge. In the face of this, and expecting that other storms may bring heavy rains or cloudbursts, we’re separating sewers and building tanks and a ton of green infrastructure all over the place, including rain gardens, permeable paving, and green roofs.

Joshua Dill: It sounds like your expectations for how frequently a storm of this magnitude can happen has changed.

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Flood response at the 26th Ward wastewater treatment plant.

Alan Cohn: Yes, we acknowledge that with sea level rise, even a smaller storm could cause as much or more damage.

About a foot of the surge from Sandy was attributable to the sea level rise that has occurred since 1900.

Joshua Dill: To wrap up, would you tell us about your vision for the future?

Colin Johnson: Before, no one really thought such a serious hurricane would ever hit New York City because it hadn’t happened for so many years, but we expect it to happen again and we need to plan for it.

Colin Johnson: Our vision, which we’re implementing right now, is being prepared and expecting another hurricane to happen. We want not only to know what to do but to have plans in place to protect the assets necessary to maintain the high level of treatment that we routinely provide, even during extreme weather events.

Alan Cohn: The storm might take a different form. We’re seeing a lot of heavy rain events and other storms that, while not of the same magnitude, need to be planned for.

Tara Deighan: The services our agency provides are so critical to the survival of the city that we need to plan 50–100 years into the future.

Joshua Dill: Has urban development on New York City’s coast made the city more vulnerable to storms?

Alan Cohn: Our main immediate focus is on implementing the recommendations of the wastewater resiliency plan and to implement integrated flood protection, including green infrastructure. We also need to continue to work with other city partners on holistic flood management, not just management on the asset level. M

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Tara Deighan is the deputy press secretary of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Alan Cohn is the managing director of integrated water management at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. Colin Johnson is an account manager in the capital construction division at the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. For more information, visit nyc.gov/dep, like DEP on Facebook, or follow it on Twitter.

PHOTO COURTESY OF NYC WATER.

Tara Deighan: I think New York City has lost about 85 percent of its wetlands since we started developing the city. We do have a program to restore them. We have realized that our wetlands and natural coastal areas are our first line of defense. We describe our wetlands as natural sponges. They absorb some of the energy of the storm surge, help filter water in a natural way, and provide a habitat for wildlife. We just completed a fabulous wetland restoration project by LaGuardia Airport in Flushing Bay. It’s growing really nicely, and New York Harbor is cleaner than it has been since the Civil War. We’re seeing that even in polluted water bodies, those wetlands are not just surviving but thriving.

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Flood waters near Dardanelle, Arkansas.

Fighting Floodwater in Arkansas

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n May 25, 2019, the crest of a record-breaking flood on the Arkansas River entered the state of Arkansas in Sebastian County. Caused by heavy rainfall in the Oklahoma region, the flood would overtop and breach several levees, causing damage to public and private property, severely disrupting freight traffic on the river, and posing a risk to private well water.

The Arkansas Department of Emergency Management (ADEM) was the agency in charge of the response. In this interview, ADEM Director A.J. Gary speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the historic flood and the coordinated response that his agency has led.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Joshua Dill: Please give us an overview of ADEM and its main duties.

A.J. Gary: ADEM is one of the few state emergency management departments in the nation that has dual roles. We handle not only emergency management but homeland security as well. We push out homeland security grants for things like hazardous materials response, weapons of mass destruction response, SWAT teams, and bomb squads, and we build regional teams around the state that draw from local fire and police departments. On the emergency management side, we do all the planning and training for any type of emergency, whether natural or manmade. We manage a lot of grants on the emergency management side as well. Through the Emergency Management Performance Grant, which is a federal grant, we help support a county emergency manager in each of Arkansas’s 75 counties. Every month, we conduct exercises with our state, local, and city partners to make sure that everyone is ready for an emergency.

We’re a 24/7 operation. We have duty officers taking calls day and night for events that may not rise to the level of a disaster, but which local authorities may need some additional resources to address. For example, a couple weeks ago, a hiker was lost for several days. The county in which he was hiking needed a helicopter a with forward-

PHOTO COURTESY OF JOCELYN AUGUSTINO.

A.J. Gary: My background is mostly in law enforcement.

I worked for the Conway Police Department in central Arkansas for 20 years. During that time, I worked in several different areas of law enforcement, including field investigations, narcotics, and the SWAT team. In 2000, I was appointed interim police chief of the City of Conway.

In 2002, after 20 years, I left the police department and moved into the private sector, working as head of security for an international airline for about 5 years. I then went back to the Conway Police Department as police chief. I remained in that position for a little over 8 years, at which time I took a job with the State of Arkansas and was then

appointed by Governor Hutchinson to be the director of ADEM as well as his homeland security advisor.

ADVERTISEMENT looking infrared camera to locate him. ADEM worked with the National Guard to get a helicopter in the air, and the hiker was found.

In large events like the recent flooding, we activate the state Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and use it to coordinate our emergency support functions (ESFs).

We have 16 ESFs, which are coordinated by specific agencies, in this case known as lead agencies. For example, ESF-1 is transportation. During a disaster, our ESF-1 station coordinates all resources related to transportation.

The lead agency for ESF-1 is the Arkansas Department of Transportation. The search and rescue support ESF is led by the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission. ESF-16, which covers cybersecurity, is fairly new. It is coordinated by the Department of Information Services. ESF-13 is public safety and security. It is coordinated by the Arkansas State Police, who also have a seat in our EOC. In between disasters, we’re training so that we are ready to carry out those functions when a disaster occurs.

Joshua Dill: How many employees does the department have?

A.J. Gary: ADEM is capped at 92 employees, but 16 of them are a part of our federal surplus property, which is a separate section. Some of our employees are dedicated to homeland security and some to emergency management.

However, during a disaster, we pull from all the departments within our agency.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your experience with the recent flooding in Arkansas.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MELODY DANIEL.

A.J. Gary: Before the flooding occurred, we started getting information from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Weather Service that we were going to have a significant rise in water that would lead to flooding along the Arkansas River. That allowed us to

hold coordination calls with all the counties that would be affected and with their emergency management agencies beginning 3 days prior to the activation of the EOC. We worked to make sure that the counties had all the resources they needed. The Arkansas River enters Arkansas in Sebastian County, near Fort Smith, crosses the state in a line from northwest to southeast, and flows into the Mississippi River in Desha County in southeastern Arkansas. There were 12 counties in the area that would be affected by the flood.

On Saturday, May 25, we activated the EOC and brought in team members from ADEM and from the ESF lead agencies. Many of my staff have been here for many years, and they say that this was the first disaster for which we had all our ESF staff in the EOC. The EOC stayed activated through June 7. It was a pretty long activation, lasting a little over 2 weeks.

Joshua Dill: What was the division of responsibilities between your agency and other state and federal agencies?

A.J. Gary: I am deeply appreciative of our county and state agencies and the coordination, cooperation, and partnership they have engaged in from early on in this event. As I mentioned before, we did coordination calls with local officials before the water crested in its first entry point in the state of Arkansas. We had all our state agencies in the EOC. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was also involved from day 1. The Army Corps, the Arkansas National Guard, and our state geographic information service (GIS) office also had representatives in the EOC throughout this event.

The Civil Air Patrol flew the Arkansas River before and during the crest of the river. Its photos, combined with information provided by the GIS office in the intelligence section of the National Guard, allowed us to develop an intel briefing and a probable inundation map every

The Arkansas River rages near Dardanelle, Arkansas.

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Flooding near the James Trimble Lock and Dam near Fort Smith, Arkansas.

Joshua Dill: Were the floods in Arkansas connected at all to the recent floods in Nebraska and Iowa, if only by being caused by the same weather patterns, or was the timing coincidental?

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A.J. Gary: I don’t think they were connected. If I understand correctly, our flooding was mainly caused by heavy rainfall in the Arkansas River watershed around Oklahoma.

Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about the damage to property caused by the flooding?

A.J. Gary: We are still developing our estimates. The water reached its first crest in Arkansas in Sebastian County on May 25 and then slowly moved down across the state. We started doing some preliminary disaster assessments early on, as the water was cresting. We knew that the flooding would affect a lot of individual houses, as well as public infrastructure like roads and levees.

Those early preliminary damage assessments allowed us to request a federal disaster declaration, which was granted. We are still gathering a lot of information for our individual assessment. Roughly 1,600 households were affected. FEMA’s individual assistance programs are up and operating. We’re still making registrations. To date, I think we have been approved for close to $7.6 million in individual household assistance; about $7.8 million has actually already been disbursed to those homeowners. We are still doing assessments of damage to infrastructure.

Of course, a lot of our levees along the Arkansas River have been affected. Some of those are maintained by the Army Corps; some are maintained by private levee boards.

Some were overtopped during the flooding or breached and suffered significant damage. Even the ones that held, particularly here in central Arkansas, have undergone

PHOTO COURTESY OF MELODY DANIEL.

morning. We could look at those maps several days ahead of the arrival of the crest of the river to see what critical infrastructure along the river would be affected. We also used the data to help with the recovery. They show the neighborhoods, residential areas, and critical infrastructure that were affected at crest both before and after inundation. Having a visual in front of you really helps.

Every morning, we had coordination calls with our counties about their needs. The counties that the crest had not yet reached were also on the call, so they were getting good intel about what was coming their way. We were actually moving sandbagging machines through the state ahead of the crest, giving our other counties time to get sandbags filled and deployed before the floodwaters reached them. The cooperation with state and federal agencies was key for the effective and smooth response to the flood.

Our governor was involved throughout this disaster. I was on the phone with him pretty much daily. When the river crested for the first time in Arkansas, the governor and I, along with federal delegates, flew up there and surveyed the damage so that we knew what we needed to request from the president in the federal declaration.

Everything that I asked for, our governor approved immediately. That included additional sandbagging machines and missions with the National Guard.

extensive damage and will have to be repaired. It seems that no serious damage has been done to water treatment plants located near the river. They may require some minor work.

The Arkansas River will have to be dredged, which will affect the barges that transport goods along the river. The economic effect will be serious: It will shut down barge traffic for a number of days. In fact, we’re not close to having that barge traffic begin again. All the locks and dams along the river will have to be inspected before barge traffic starts. Many of them were underwater.

Joshua Dill: Was there any danger of contamination to private wells?

A.J. Gary: I’m sure there was. There has been some testing, and we have coordinated some activities that allowed citizens to have their wells tested to see if they had been affected. A lot of agricultural land was inundated, and the runoff from cattle farms and ranches could have gotten into the river. The Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality was much involved. It was also represented in the EOC.

A.J. Gary: This was record-breaking flooding, and we are we are still gathering information on the damage we sustained and what improvements need to be made. I think the key is improving our levees, which would reduce the risk to our critical infrastructure.

We are also emphasizing the importance of flood insurance, not only for publicly owned facilities but for privately owned homes and businesses along our waterways as well. Unfortunately, we’re seeing that a little over 90 percent of the households affected by this flood did not have flood insurance.

I also want to encourage our cities and counties to use the flood maps we have developed for any future projects they have. If they’re looking to put in an additional water treatment plant or another piece of critical infrastructure, they should use these maps to ensure that the facilities will not be affected by future flooding. M A.J. Gary is the director of the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management. He can be contacted at publicaffairs@adem.arkansas.gov.

Joshua Dill: What are your plans moving forward?

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Green Water Infrastructure for Chicago Chicago Department of Water Management employees at work.

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he Chicago Department of Water Management provides water and sewer service to over 5 million people in the greater Chicago area. Though much of its water infrastructure dates back to the 19th century, its major infrastructure revitalization and environmental initiatives earned the Department of Water Management a 2018 Sustainable Water Utility Management Award from the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies.

In this interview, Randy Conner, commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how his agency is building a stronger, more efficient, and cleaner water system for the city.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the Department of Water Management.

Randy Conner: The department serves about 5.4 million people within the state of Illinois, which is about 42 percent of the state’s population. With approximately 2,100 employees, it is the largest nonemergency department in the city government. The department was created in the 1800s to ensure a supply of clean water. Built in 1869, the Chicago water tower was the city’s first pumping station and water purification plant. Of course, cities create waste, and there was a problem with waste being dumped into Lake Michigan. The city government decided to protect public health by developing a sewer system. Because the

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF WATER MANAGMENT.

Randy Conner: In university, I studied construction practices and engineering principles, and every summer I worked with my father, who owned his own construction company.

He was the first minority contractor to do concrete work for the City of Chicago. In 1994, I consulted for an engineering consulting firm. In 1996, I began my career with the city as an engineering technician. I was in charge of the City of Chicago’s Aldermanic Menu Program, in which aldermen were given money to do infrastructure upgrades within their respective wards. Then I was put in charge of the Chicago Department of Transportation’s Engineering Division, overseeing about 15 engineers. We did new street construction design work and handled all the construction engineering issues for the Department

of Transportation’s in-house crews. I then became deputy commissioner of infrastructure management at the Department of Transportation. I oversaw the entire public way for the City of Chicago, which involves pavement marking, directional signage, ticketing, and other things related to construction in the public way. In 2007, I became the first deputy commissioner of the Chicago Department of Street and Sanitation, which handles garbage pickup, snow removal, graffiti removal, and other things of that nature. I was charged with overseeing day-to-day operations as well as the administration of the department. In 2014, I was tasked to go back to the Department of Transportation as first deputy commissioner. I oversaw day-to-day operations and administration. In 2017, Mayor Emanuel tapped me to be the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management.

ADVERTISEMENT existing pumping station was so close to the shoreline, it was decided that a new water intake needed to be built further out into the water to avoid the risk of disease caused by the wastewater being dumped in the lake. From that point, as the city grew, more intake structures like the one I described would be built. Nine were built in total. Five are inactive at this point, two have been demolished, and two are still functional. One serves the Eugene Sawyer Filtration Plant at the southern end of the city, which is the oldest filtration plant in Chicago. The other serves the Jardine Filtration Plant, which is the second oldest and is also the largest water purification plant in the world. More pumping stations were also built to enable water distribution throughout the city. Today, there are 12 pumping stations connected by approximately 4,200 miles of water main. At different points in the city, we connect with suburban water suppliers. We actually sell water to 51 suburbs. They distribute water to customers downstream.

We are also in charge of the sewer system. In 2003, the Department of Water and the Department of Sewers were combined into the Department of Water Management. We have a combined sewer system for wastewater as well as storm water. Overall, we maintain approximately 4,400 miles of sewer, 4,200 miles of water main, 12 pumping stations, 2 filtration plants, and the 2 intake structures in the middle of the lake.

rates four times. The first year, there was a 25 percent increase to really give the project a boost. Then, there were 15 percent increases for the next 3 years running. It wasn’t an easy thing to sell. We had to get it through our city council and through partners including the unions and other city agencies. Several conversations had to take place prior to the implementation of these rate increases. We were able to put a lot of people to work, both city employees and contract employees. Having a stronger water infrastructure allows the city to sustain growth, bringing more revenue to Chicago and increasing the tax base, which in turn allows us to keep rehabilitating our system.

Joshua Dill: Does all of Chicago’s water come from Lake Michigan?

Randy Conner: We realized that the level of Lake Michigan was falling. Even though it replenishes itself, it is not replenishing as fast as we hoped it would because of global warming and things of that nature. There is a general loss of water through the system itself. The water meters give us a great idea of how much water we’re actually taking out of the lake. We can only take so much water from Lake Michigan because of the Great Lakes Pact. Chicago is one of the only cities that does not have to put water back into the lake under the pact, but we do have to monitor how much water we take out.

Randy Conner: Yes. All our water comes from Lake Michigan. We have the privilege of being located next to the world’s largest freshwater source. It makes it a lot easier for us to distribute and treat water.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your recent infrastructure revitalization projects.

Randy Conner: In 2011, when Mayor Emanuel was elected, he saw the need to update the infrastructure of the city of Chicago. He came up with a plan to replace approximately 880 miles of water main and to upgrade 4 of our pumping stations from steam to electric. We are approximately 75 percent done with that. We’ve got about 680 miles of water main replaced. We should be done in 2021, at which point we will have spent approximately $6 billion dollars on infrastructure upgrades.

Joshua Dill: How has the city funded those projects?

Randy Conner: We have made use of a number of different strategies. We have used clean water loans from the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency and used bonding through several sources in Chicago. We have also raised our

Joshua Dill: Was it a challenge to communicate that to your ratepayers?

Randy Conner: It was a challenge. We had to have everybody buy into it. We held meetings with the city council and the suburbs, because our 51 direct-connect suburbs pay the same rates for water as Chicago residents do. They have to be on board as well, because the money that they provide pays not only for the water but for system maintenance as well. Those conversations took about a year.

Joshua Dill: How do your residential water meters contribute to water conservation?

Joshua Dill: What other environmental initiatives is the department working on?

Randy Conner: When we started the capital improvement program, we tried to replace pipe one for one. If we took a 12-inch pipe out, we put a 12-inch pipe back. Once we realized that this was not adequately addressing flooding, we started to look at this a little differently. We know that we are getting more frequent heavy rain events, and we want to ensure that the people of Chicago are not getting water backed up in their basements. We’ve started looking downstream to figure out how flooding issues work. Flooding on one block may be caused by a problem two blocks away.

We need to make changes in our sewer system so that it can accommodate more water. We started saying, “Maybe our MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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Chicago Department of Water Management employees at work.

Joshua Dill: What are the department’s top issues today?

Randy Conner: Water conservation and water quality are always top issues. Chicago has always been a leader in research into water quality and distribution. We’re always looking at greener and more efficient ways to treat our water.

We all know about the water issues of Flint, Michigan.

No one wants that to happen in their city. We work with the federal and Illinois Environmental Protection Agencies to ensure that we keep our freshwater sources clean and address

30 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

any chemicals that get into the water. We want to address the issue of medicines being flushed down the toilet or otherwise entering the water. We’re also leaders in research on lead. We are conducting a study right now, the first of its kind in the United States, of the feasibility of replacing the city’s lead service lines. Chicago has approximately 400,000 service lines within the city; about 300,000 of them are still lead. We can’t just go in and replace the lines; we have to make sure that we’re doing it correctly and properly.

Joshua Dill: Do you do your research in house, or do you work with local universities?

Randy Conner: A bit of both. We do research in house through our Water Quality Division. We are part of a water innovation nonprofit called Current that researches what other countries and municipalities are doing. We also partner with several universities within the city of Chicago and Illinois as a whole. I sit on the board of the Water Research Foundation.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future?

Randy Conner: Our job is to make sure that people have clean, pure water. Our vision is to continue doing that as well as helping to make the world more green. We’re undertaking an education campaign right now to get people to understand that even though we sit on the world’s largest source of freshwater, everyone has a part to play in keeping that freshwater clean. M

Randy Conner is the commissioner of the Chicago Department of Water Management. For more information about the Department of Water Management, please visit www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/water.html.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF CHICAGO DEPARTMENT OF WATER MANAGMENT.

pipes should not be 12 inches—maybe we should upgrade to 14 inches.” We need to upgrade our system to accommodate the people who are moving into the city.

We know that Chicago has a lot of concrete and asphalt.

As time goes on, there is more construction within the city, and as we get 100-year rains, there is more water going into the system. Knowing that the climate is going to keep changing, how do we keep some of this water on the surface or get it back into the ground more quickly and avoid overloading the system? We have a pilot program in which we are working with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Chicago to mitigate flooding in one of the areas that frequently floods. We’re going to be adding backflow preventers, cisterns on private property, and water gardens and bioswales on private property. We’re also looking at different ways to pave our streets with porous asphalt so that the water goes through the asphalt and into the ground.

We’re taking a look at redesigning our sewer lids to keep water on the street longer so that it doesn’t overtax the system.

We collaborate with the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District and the Chicago Public Schools on a program at grammar schools called Space to Grow. We take dilapidated playgrounds and turn them into raingardens and bioswales that give the kids a place to play and to learn. They help the kids understand water conservation as well as flooding. A holding tank underneath one of these projects can hold up to 100,000 gallons of water.

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How Municipal Water Districts Can Work With FEMA Workers install a blue tarp on a roof damaged by Hurricane Irma in Monroe County, Florida, as a part of FEMA’s Operation Blue Roof program.

T

he Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is the U.S. government agency charged with coordinating disaster response at a scale that goes beyond the capacities of local or state governments. The agency provides on-the-ground recovery efforts in coordination with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and other federal and local agencies and also provides state and local governments with expert advice, funding, and training.

In this interview with Municipal Water Leader, a FEMA spokesperson highlighted the planning resources that FEMA has prepared for local government entities and explained how municipalities and municipal water districts can best work with FEMA. Municipal Water Leader: When a natural disaster strikes, what is the breakdown of responsibilities between federal, state, and local entities?

FEMA: Once a disaster is approved for federal assistance, response is state managed and locally executed with federal support, including funding and technical assistance.

FEMA: We encourage municipalities to initially coordinate with their local and state emergency management agencies.

Those are the two entities they will be coordinating with before, during, and after most disasters. If it is apparent that a presidential disaster declaration may be necessary to assist in the recovery of the affected area, a state or tribal government should contact its FEMA regional office and request a joint Federal and State/Tribal

32 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Municipal Water Leader: What kind of preparations should municipalities do before a disaster hits?

FEMA: FEMA works to ensure that communities have the tools needed to make informed decisions to reduce risks and vulnerabilities and to effectively respond and recover.

Municipalities need to understand potential threats and hazards and write a predisaster recovery plan to address those areas. For more information, please see FEMA’s publications Pre-Disaster Recovery Planning Guide for Local Governments and Hurricane Playbook.

Municipal Water Leader: How should people plan ahead for a natural disaster?

FEMA: FEMA has an entire website dedicated to helping individuals plan ahead for disasters. We encourage your readers to visit ready.gov. This site will inform them about disasters and how to plan ahead and take action when one occurs. M

For more about FEMA, visit www.fema.gov.

PHOTO COURTESY OF U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY.

Municipal Water Leader: How can municipalities and municipal water districts work best with FEMA?

Preliminary Damage Assessment. Local government representatives should be included, if possible. (For more information on the Disaster Declaration Process, please visit www.fema.gov/disaster-declaration-process.) If a presidential disaster declaration has been made, the state or tribe will set up public assistance applicants’ briefings and invite potential applicants.

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How IPM Can Help Water Utilities With Personnel Transitions

W

hen a high-level manager moves on to a new job, a municipal water agency may find itself caught flat-footed. It usually takes 4–5 months to replace a high-level manager or executive, and in the meantime, an agency may struggle to smoothly fulfil the departed employee’s functions. This is the problem that Tim Pickering aimed to solve when he founded Interim Public Management (IPM). IPM has a network of over 200 experienced associates who can fill these positions while a company carries out the search for a permanent replacement.

In this interview, Tim Pickering, president and chief executive officer of IPM, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company’s niche in the business world.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in the current position.

34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

Tim Pickering: I founded IPM in 2010, and the company has grown ever since. A newly incorporated municipality with about 500 residents and no employees called us, and we were a perfect fit for it. Today, we serve clients as large as the City of Phoenix, as well as other cities and counties.

We are located in Fountain Hills, Arizona. We’ve got about 240 associates available for interim assignments. In background, they are mainly early retirees from the public sector who have served in executive-level positions like finance director, director of public works, or IT director. We also have four internal staff who make it all work.

Joshua Dill: What is the basic service you provide?

Tim Pickering: We provide interim employees at the executive level for public-sector organizations. An organization can’t function for long without certain high-level employees like the finance director, so whenever someone leaves one of those positions, we have individuals we call associates who are ready to jump in and help. They typically spend 3–6 months at an organization. Our company doesn’t do headhunting.

We’re not trying to fill a position permanently. We’re just trying to help out organizations that need highly skilled individuals who can perform those roles for limited periods of time.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF IPM.

Tim Pickering: I was trained as a city manager and ran four municipalities. We oversaw water and wastewater operations.

When I was on my last assignment, a personnel issue arose and left me with a vacancy for an essential position. I wasn’t able to bring someone who was truly qualified in to fill the gap—someone who had done the job before, was properly trained, and could be there in 2 weeks. That’s when I knew there had to be a niche for this kind of service in the public sector.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your company’s history.

ADVERTISEMENT Joshua Dill: What sorts of organizations do you work with?

Tim Pickering: In the past, we have worked with public sector organizations such as cities. We have found that utilities and other public-sector agencies have the same needs as those organizations: They all need an IT director, a project manager, and a utility director. All those positions are similar across organizations. The public sector is quite different from the private sector, and you need to have worked in that arena to understand it. That experience allows us to provide experienced professional-level managers to water utilities and irrigation agencies as well.

Joshua Dill: How long does it usually take companies to find a replacement?

Tim Pickering: Without our services, it typically takes 4–5 months. However, if a company calls us, we can usually get someone there in 2 weeks’ time. Sometimes we can turn it around more quickly. This isn’t typical, but in one instance, I had someone at a company the next day after someone left unexpectedly.

Joshua Dill: What do companies that have never heard of IPM do when they have executive-level vacancies?

Tim Pickering: Currently, there are two alternatives for organizations in the public sector. The first one is to do nothing. That isn’t a good solution in most cases because departments can go sideways quickly. The other alternative is to name an internal candidate. A few problems can arise in that case. First, this person is now doing two jobs, and it’s difficult to do two jobs successfully. Second, that person sometimes develops the expectation that their new role will be permanent. If that’s not the case, and someone else is selected, their feelings can be hurt, and that can be disruptive for the department.

we focus on supervisory-level positions. If the job needs a degree, we probably have a qualified associate who can fill that position. We’ve also expanded the number of positions that we serve. Last time I put the list together, we offered services for 60 different executive and professional positions.

That’s a big change from when we started. We’ve also expanded geographically. Not only do we work in Arizona, we’ve done work in Colorado and Missouri. We’ve also improved and developed our customer satisfaction tracking.

At the end of each placement, we send out a survey, and we tally the results. We use those results to improve our customer service. Ninety-eight percent of our clients say they would recommend this service to their colleagues or friends.

The last thing I’d say is that we have improved simply because we’ve been through this process so many times that we can guarantee that we can meet your time frame and provide an interim employee within a couple of weeks, and you will know that that person has experience, is a professional, and has led departments before.

Joshua Dill: Tell me about your vision for the future.

Tim Pickering: We’ve already served at least 50 different public-sector clients, and I want IPM to be ready to help water utilities and irrigation districts as well. I want water utilities and irrigation districts to be able to improve their operations and handle any transitions that come up. During leadership transitions and other opportunities to improve their departments, I want to ensure that they have highquality professionals in temporarily vacant positions. I envision having our team management employees ready when those types of agencies need them. M

Joshua Dill: How do you find your associates?

Tim Pickering: Mainly by word of mouth. An associate who works for me will tell one of their former colleagues about IPM, and that person will call and say, “Hey, I’d like to serve.”

The other way we do it is by contacting our large network and asking them for references. People often ask me how I know our associates are good. First of all, our associates have to have been in the public sector for around 30 years. Once a person has met that criterion, we think they’re probably good at their job.

Joshua Dill: Have you changed your methods over the last few years as you have gained experience?

Tim Pickering: Yes, particularly in the types and numbers of positions we focus on. We don’t focus on first-line employees;

Tim Pickering is the president and CEO of IPM. He can be contacted at tim@interimpublicmanagement.com or at (480) 577-0949. For more information about IPM, visit www.interimpublicmanagement.com.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

| 35

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