Municipal Water Leader November/December 2020

Volume 7 Issue 10

November/December 2020

Dave Roberts: Careful Planning and Strong Partnerships—The Keys to the Salt River Project's Water Reliability, Today and in the Future

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

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STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Stephanie Biddle, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer Caroline Polly, Production Assistant and Social Media Coordinator

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Dave Roberts: Careful Planning and Strong Partnerships—The Keys to the Salt River Project's Water Reliability, Today and in the Future

Contents

November/December 2020 Volume 7, Issue 10 5 L ong-Term Water Resources Planning in Arizona

By Kris Polly 6 Dave

Roberts: Careful Planning and Strong Partnerships—The Keys to the Salt River Project’s Water Reliability, Today and in the Future 12 I nfrastructure Planning for the Next Century at the Salt River Project

By Ron Klawitter

16 The Value of Partnerships

By Christa McJunkin 20 F reese and Nichols: A Century of Experience in Wastewater Services 26 S torm Water Capture and Reuse at San Diego International Airport THE INNOVATORS 34 K ETOS: Delivering Intelligence and Analytics for the Water Industry

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions; 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 municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts 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 all drinking and wastewater entities with annual budgets or sales of $10 million per year or greater as well as to members of Congress and committee staff and advertising sponsors. For address corrections or additions, or if you would prefer to receive Municipal Water Leader in electronic form, please contact our managing editor, Joshua Dill, at joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com.

Copyright © 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.

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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 | November/December 2020

COVER PHOTO:

Dave Roberts, SRP Associate General Manager and Chief Water Resources Executive.

Photo courtesy of SRP.

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PHOTO COURTESY OF SRP.

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Long-Term Water Resources Planning in Arizona

By Kris Polly

I

n our cover story, Dave Roberts, the associate general manager and chief water resources executive of Arizona’s Salt River Project (SRP), talks about the agency’s contributions to the Colorado River basin's Drought Contingency Plan and its work to increase its resilience to drought conditions both on the Colorado and on the Salt River.

Next, two articles by SRP staff further update us on water management in Arizona’s Valley of the Sun. In one, SRP’s principal for water system projects, Ron Klawitter, describes how SRP is keeping its reservoirs and other major infrastructure in top condition to serve future generations of Arizonans. In the other, SRP’s director of water strategy, Christa McJunkin, describes the benefits of SRP’s partnership with the Central Arizona Project (CAP) and the planned construction of an SRP-CAP Interconnection Facility to complement the existing CAP-SRP Interconnection Facility.

David Jackson, the treatment practice leader at the consulting engineering firm Freese and Nichols, tells us of the firm’s more than 120 years of wastewater experience and its commitment to client service.

Richard Gilb of the San Diego International Airport gives us a fascinating look into how a facility with

the nation’s single busiest runway captures and reuses rainwater and is planning for the future with a water stewardship plan.

Finally, in our The Innovators section, we speak with Meena Sankaran, founder and CEO of the award-winning firm KETOS, which provides water quality and quantity data services to clients with its patented hardware and software.

With growing populations, aging infrastructure, and changing climatic conditions, water management must always be future oriented. SRP’s work with partners across Arizona and the Colorado River basin provide an excellent example of this, as does the work of all the entities we feature in this final issue of 2020. M Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO 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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Dave Roberts: Careful Planning and Strong Partnerships—The Keys to the Salt River Project's Water Reliability, Today and in the Future Roosevelt Dam, the largest dam in SRP’s system.

T

Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about SRP and its history.

6 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Dave Roberts: SRP was formed in 1903 as one of the first Reclamation projects authorized under the National Reclamation Act. Over the years, SRP has evolved to become the largest supplier of water in the greater Phoenix metropolitan area, delivering more than 800,000 acre-feet annually to agricultural, municipal, and urban water users. It is also a community-based, not-for-profit public power utility serving more than 1 million customers in greater Phoenix.

More than 100 years ago, the federal government and local leaders and landowners in central Arizona realized that federal investment in infrastructure through partnerships with local landowners was critical to ensuring that the community in the Salt River Valley would be able to manage the waters of the Salt and Verde Rivers to allow the region to grow and prosper. Ranchers municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF SRP.

he Salt River Project (SRP) is a major utility that provides both electrical power and water to more than 2 million people in the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan region. SRP manages 131 miles of Bureau of Reclamation– owned canals and more than 1,000 miles of laterals. With such a large customer base in a region susceptible to drought, SRP puts significant effort into conservation, efficiency, and maintaining its storage and delivery infrastructure for the future. In this interview, Dave Roberts, SRP associate general manager and chief water resources executive, tells Municipal Water Leader about SRP’s contributions to the Colorado River basin's Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) and its work to increase its resilience to drought conditions both on the Colorado and on the Salt River.

ADVERTISEMENT Today, we are looking at the next generation of infrastructure and operational partnerships needed to maintain central Arizona’s water resiliency in light of growing water needs and a changing climate. One example is our partnership with the Central Arizona Project (CAP).

From 1973 to 1993, the federal government constructed the CAP canal, a 336-mile system that brings Colorado River water to central and southern Arizona. Through the years, the leaders of SRP and CAP have understood the value of working together to ensure a reliable source of water for this region. In the 1990s, the two agencies constructed the CAP-SRP Interconnect Facility (CSIF)—a one-way interconnection that, for the first time, allowed Colorado River water to flow into SRP’s water service territory, increasing the operational flexibility of the two systems.

Municipal Water Leader: How has SRP prepared for drought conditions in the Salt and Verde watersheds and on the Colorado River?

and farmers pledged their own land as collateral to obtain a loan through the National Reclamation Act to build Roosevelt Dam—the first of the seven dams and reservoirs that today provide a reliable supply of water for the greater Phoenix metropolitan area. Through the middle of the 20th century, SRP, the federal government, and local water users continued to use this model to expand the SRP dam and reservoir system, improve the resiliency of the Phoenix metropolitan area’s water supplies, and help industry grow in rural parts of the state. These investments have paid off many times over.

In addition to the seven dams and reservoirs that serve Phoenix with water and hydropower, SRP’s system contains more than 1,300 miles of canals and laterals that deliver water to our customers. municipalwaterleader.com

Dave Roberts: Research that we have done with Reclamation concerning the effects of climate change shows that the reduction in water supplies produced by the Salt and Verde River watersheds is expected to relatively minor compared to the reductions that other western river basins may see. The research finds that SRP’s water supplies are produced during the winter, when sun angles, temperatures, and evaporation rates are lower than they are during late spring and early summer, when other western river basins produce their water. Additionally, the multiyear carryover storage capacity of SRP’s reservoir system and its defined water service area will help to manage a future with higher temperatures and increased temperature variability. This gives us confidence that, through continued conservation and the proactive management of our surface water and groundwater supplies, SRP can continue to deliver reliable water supplies to the Salt River Valley even in the face of climate change.

The location of SRP’s water system along the CAP canal also presents opportunities for managing the challenges to central Arizona brought on by climate change and continued drought.

One of the key projects to improve drought resiliency is the planned SRP-CAP Interconnect Facility (SCIF), which would allow water supplies from SRP’s system to move into the CAP system—in other words, the opposite of what is allowed by the CSIF. The new interconnection would further improve the flexibility of central Arizona’s water infrastructure—something that will become more important as climate change and climate variability affect the region.

SRP continues to plan for the future of our water system, considering any necessary upgrades or modifications to our facilities and operations that can be used to improve our management of Arizona’s water supplies.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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SRP delivers water through a series of nine canals that were developed over the past 100 years.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about your planning for the future?

8 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SRP.

Dave Roberts: Climate change research shows that we will have longer and more severe dry periods in the future, but it also shows that there will be wetter periods and larger runoff events. Right now, our system works by capturing water

during the wet periods and storing it to get us through the dry periods. If the climate develops as research predicts, our reservoirs will play an even more critical role in providing a resilient water supply to the Phoenix metropolitan area.

One of SRP’s current challenges is that Horseshoe Reservoir on the Verde River is losing capacity at a rate of about 1,000 acre-feet each year due to natural

ADVERTISEMENT sedimentation. To date, the reservoir has lost about onethird of its original capacity. The amount of sediment that has accumulated in Horseshoe could fill a football field nearly 9 miles tall. SRP has partnered with Reclamation to conduct an appraisal study and to bring together stakeholders to evaluate different options for addressing the sediment issue, including sediment removal, building new structures, and modifying existing dams. We think that, through this appraisal process, we will find a solution that meets the needs of central Arizona for the next century, ensures the resiliency of SRP’s system, and reduces central Arizona’s dependency on fossil groundwater.

Another example is a project at Roosevelt Dam, where we are working with Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to improve our operational flexibility in the reservoir’s flood control space. Roosevelt Dam contains around 70 feet of additional storage capacity above the conservation pool behind the dam. SRP is only allowed to hold water in that area for 20 days; it then must release it. We are partnering with the federal agencies to evaluate options to extend the release period so that we have more time within the runoff season to put the water to beneficial use or to store it underground for later use.

Additional water created through improved operational flexibility could be used to provide a backup supply for the low-priority Colorado River supplies that are most at risk of shortage and to replace or supplement the use of fossil groundwater.

Lastly, SRP continues to operate and maintain a robust groundwater well system and underground storage projects.

SRP is planning several enhancements to its well system, including piping less-active wells into our canal system to add additional active capacity and to further balance operational well capacity throughout our system. SRP is also assessing further underground water storage opportunities in its service area.

SRP continues to proactively plan for the future to ensure that the water infrastructure that has served the valley for more than a century will reliably do so for another 100 years and that our operations most effectively use the infrastructure that we have invested in.

Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about the DCP process.

What does the plan mean for Arizonans?

Dave Roberts: The DCP was a tremendously successful collaborative process bringing together water interests throughout the entire Colorado River basin to ensure the sustainability of the Colorado River’s water supplies.

In Arizona, the DCP aims to sustain the state’s CAP water supplies through additional measures to conserve water and improve water storage levels at Lake Mead.

This is of particular importance to the Phoenix metro

municipalwaterleader.com

area. After the first 2 years of operations, the DCP is working exactly as anticipated. Water levels at Lake Mead have improved because of the additional conservation measures, and all parties within Arizona and the basin as a whole are meeting DCP objectives.

So far, it is a great success story for the Colorado River basin. We should all be proud.

Municipal Water Leader: What role did SRP play in the process?

Dave Roberts: In general, the Phoenix area’s water supply is only as resilient as our least-prepared city. While SRP does have a focus on its water service area, it also takes measures to make sure all Salt River Valley cities have a resilient water supply so that businesses and families are confident they can move to the Phoenix metropolitan area without worrying about their water supply. Under the DCP, SRP agreed to provide 50,000 acre-feet of water to CAP under the two entities’ existing water exchange arrangement to help sustain municipal water supplies when CAP’s supplies are reduced due to cuts in deliveries from Lake Mead.

Additionally, SRP joined with the Gila River Indian Community to create Gila River Water Storage LLC, which provided 445,000 acre-feet of long-term storage credits to the Central Arizona Groundwater Replenishment District (CAGRD). The CAGRD is one of the lower-priority CAP water customers, but it serves customers that provide water to homes and businesses.

Because the CAGRD would likely not receive any water during a Colorado River shortage, Gila Water River Storage provided these credits to help the CAGRD sustain its water replenishment obligations for the residential and municipal customers it serves. This was a key factor in helping Arizona fulfil its DCP mitigation plan.

In the future, SRP and CAP are planning to collaborate even more to help each other sustain water supplies for our respective and joint customers. Integrating our water delivery systems through the SCIF and potentially creating additional conservation storage capacity are key steps we can take to make sure that we can meet any future Colorado River shortage guidelines that are established after the expiration of the DCP in 2026. M

Dave Roberts is an associate general manager and the chief water resources executive at SRP. He can be contacted at dave.roberts@srpnet.com.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Infrastructure Planning for the Next Century at the Salt River Project

By Ron Klawitter

Theodore Roosevelt Dam is the largest dam in the SRP system.

M

12 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

While research conducted by SRP and the Bureau of Reclamation shows the effects of climate change on the water yield of SRP watersheds to be relatively minor compared to the reductions that other western river basins may see, climate modeling data also show that Arizona can expect more extreme weather patterns; bigger floods; and longer, more-severe droughts. This means that maintaining SRP’s annual carryover storage capacity is critical to managing variations in river flows.

Water is precious in the desert, and every drop that can be stored during wet periods can help customers during dry periods. Over the years, however, the accumulation of natural sedimentation in the Verde River basin has significantly reduced the water storage capacity of one of the two reservoirs in the basin, Horseshoe Reservoir, creating uncertainty about SRP’s future water management capabilities. In fact, around 45,000 acre-feet of storage—nearly one-third of the reservoir’s original water capacity—has been lost to sedimentation. That municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SRP.

ore than a century ago, the founders of the Salt River Project (SRP) had a vision to build a dam and a reservoir that would allow people to thrive in the harsh desert of central Arizona. SRP has followed that original vision by expanding its system from a single dam—Theodore Roosevelt Dam—to a system made up of seven dams and reservoirs with a total storage capacity of more than 4 million acre-feet.

Today, SRP continues to build on that foundation through planning efforts intended to provide reliable water and power to the thriving Phoenix metropolitan area for another century.

With more than 8.3 million acres of watershed, SRP delivers more than 800,000 acre-feet of water annually from the Salt and Verde Rivers to 10 cities and towns as well as to agricultural customers.

Issues such as climate change, forest fires endangering the watershed, and a growing population can be daunting, but SRP is preparing to provide a reliable source of water not only today but in the future as well.

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The accumulation of natural sedimentation in SRP's Horseshoe Reservoir has filled 45,000 acre-feet of storage space—nearly one-third of the reservoir’s original water capacity.

volume could provide nearly 90,000 families with the water they need for a year.

This fall, Reclamation officials will conduct a study to evaluate possible ways to address this loss of storage capacity. The process will include meetings to receive input from stakeholders representing a broad range of expertise and interests.

SRP believes that, through this appraisal process, it will find a solution that helps meet the needs of central Arizona for the next century, ensures the resiliency of its system, and reduces central Arizona’s dependency on fossil groundwater.

While sedimentation is an issue on the Verde River side of the watershed, SRP officials are also looking at ways to make the Salt River reservoir system more efficient.

Theodore Roosevelt Dam is the largest dam in the SRP system, and Theodore Roosevelt Lake is its largest reservoir, with a capacity of more than 1.6 million acre-feet of water. The reservoir contains around 70 vertical feet of additional storage capacity above the conservation pool, representing space for an additional 1.8 million acre-feet. Current operational requirements dictate that SRP evacuate water in that area within 20 days, making it challenging to put flood waters to beneficial use.

The utility is working with Reclamation and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to evaluate options to improve the operational flexibility in the reservoir’s flood control space. This would allow SRP and its partners more municipalwaterleader.com

time during the runoff season to put the water to beneficial use or to store it underground for later use. It would also provide an opportunity to improve the water security of communities in central Arizona that face potential future shortfalls based on expected demands or available supplies, such as those affected by shortage on the Colorado River.

These two projects play a critical role as we continue to prepare our infrastructure and operations for the future while also creating opportunities to help sustainably meet the water needs of Central Arizona.

As SRP prepares for the next 100 years, what will Arizona’s current water managers do to prepare for our children in the same way that the visionary leaders of the 20th century did? Armed with research and input from stakeholders and partnering with federal agencies and other agencies, SRP will continue to invest in its infrastructure to help improve the management of Arizona’s most precious resource. M Ron Klawitter is the principal for water system projects at SRP. He can be contacted at ronald.klawitter@srpnet.com.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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The Value of Partnerships

By Christa McJunkin

The existing CAP-SRP Interconnection Facility.

P

16 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

The CAP water system begins with intake pumps at Lake Havasu, Arizona, that divert Colorado River water into the CAP canal, a 336‑mile-long aqueduct system stretching from Lake Havasu through Phoenix to south of Tucson. The CAP canal delivers about 1.5 million acre-feet of Colorado River water each year to cities, agricultural users, and tribal communities in c entral and southern Arizona.

SRP delivers more than 800,000 acre-feet of water annually from a watershed located in northeastern Arizona to more than 2.5 million people in 10 cities and towns, including both residential and agricultural customers.

In 1989, the CAP-SRP Interconnection Facility (CSIF) was constructed. This one-way interconnection from the CAP canal to SRP’s water delivery system has a total capacity of 1,200 cubic feet per second. This connection allows CAP water to be delivered to any point along more than 1,200 miles of SRP canals and laterals, including recharge facilities and the 11 drinking water treatment municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SRP.

roviding a reliable and affordable source of water in the desert has never been an easy task. Not only does it require careful planning and solid infrastructure, it requires partnerships.

Just as the landowners and farmers who banded together to work with the federal government to form the Salt River Project (SRP) 100 years ago knew, one simply cannot survive in the desert by going it alone. That is why, a century later, SRP continues to look for partnerships that will assist it to deliver affordable and reliable water not only to its own customers but to others as well.

One example of a successful partnership is the interconnection between SRP’s water system and that of the Central Arizona Project (CAP). Delivering a combined 2.3 million acre-feet of water per year to more than 5 million Arizonans, the interconnection helps SRP and CAP manage the water resources that support central Arizona’s communities and economy.

ADVERTISEMENT plants used to provide safe, reliable drinking water to Phoenix and its suburbs.

“The CSIF has provided additional flexibility for CAP water users to have access to their CAP water. It is a testament to thoughtful investment in infrastructure and how collaborative solutions can support water user needs to meet their Patrick Dent, CAP water demands,” says Patrick Dent, the CAP water policy director. policy director Since the CSIF was first used in 1990, a total of 3.4 million acre-feet of CAP water has been transported through it. More than half—1.8 million acre-feet—has been recharged underground for future use at three recharge facilities operated by SRP. While most of the remaining 1.6 million acre-feet has been transported to city water treatment plants and put to other municipal uses, some of the water has been exchanged between SRP and CAP during times of extreme drought or system maintenance.

From 2000 to 2004, a time of extreme drought in the Salt and Verde watersheds, SRP was faced with the prospect of empty reservoirs despite having reduced water allocations. This dire situation was avoided through the purchase and exchange of more than 600,000 acre-feet of CAP water to supplement SRP’s water supplies from 2000 to 2004.

In 2019, SRP was able to reciprocate by supporting CAP during a major system maintenance project. In that year, the Salt River siphon, which moves CAP water under the Salt River, needed to be drained so that its lining could be inspected and repaired. Since the siphon is located upstream of the CSIF, any CAP water orders that would normally be delivered via the CSIF could not be made unless CAP and SRP worked together. In preparation for the siphon outage, SRP and CAP operational staff collaborated on a plan by which SRP would take delivery of additional CAP water prior to the siphon outage and then would be able to maintain delivery of CAP water orders during the siphon outage. The collaboration was a great success.

The leadership of both SRP and CAP realized a long time ago that they could help each other both in times of severe dry periods and when water was in abundance and do it in an efficient and cost-effective way. In order to facilitate expanded delivery and to enhance the resiliency of the Salt River Valley’s water supplies, the construction of a new SRP-CAP interconnection facility (SCIF) has been proposed. This interconnection would flow in the opposite direction of the existing CSIF, and much like that facility, it would be a critical component of the municipalwaterleader.com

valley’s water delivery infrastructure. The purpose of the SCIF would be to push water to areas where it’s needed in central Arizona.

One use for the SCIF would be to deliver water held in the 287,000 acre-feet of storage capacity in the New Conservation Space (NCS) at SRP’s largest reservoir, Roosevelt Lake. NCS water is stored at the dam by the cities of Chandler, Glendale, Mesa, Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe and is intended for use outside SRP’s service area. Using the SCIF would eliminate the need for additional infrastructure to move this water outside SRP’s service area.

With the SCIF in place, NCS water and other water supplies could be delivered directly to city water treatment plants located along the CAP canal. The parties involved would coordinate operations to facilitate the use of the CAP canal without affecting other CAP deliveries, likely providing additional operational flexibility. “The SCIF will provide significant operational and water reliability benefits for water users served by both CAP and SRP,” says Mr. Dent.

Perhaps most importantly, the SCIF will enable the recovery of water stored underground at recharge facilities located within SRP’s water service area. Like the surface water stored in SRP’s reservoirs, recovered well water can currently only be delivered using SRP’s delivery system.

That presents a problem, considering that the vast majority of this water is intended to meet needs outside SRP’s service area, including those related to future growth or shortage conditions. With the new interconnection in place, cities like Phoenix, which holds credits for more than 200,000 acre-feet of water stored underground within SRP’s service area, can arrange to use SRP’s wells for recovery. One or more wells would pump Phoenix’s stored water and deliver it to SRP customers in place of the SRP water they would normally receive.

These interconnections offer valuable benefits such as an infrastructure solution, significant cost savings to cities, and a secure water resource management tool that provides added resiliency. And with a joint vision of the future and the goal of being prepared for uncertainty and able to work in partnership, SRP and CAP continue to collaborate to ensure a reliable and sustainable water future for their customers. M

Christa McJunkin is the director of water strategy at SRP. She can be contacted at christa.mcjunkin@srpnet.com.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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Sliplining Provides a Solution for Water Lines

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rovidence Water recently carried out a supplemental tunnel and aqueduct inspection and repair program to address concerns about its existing 78‑ and 102‑inch prestressed concrete cylinder pipe. “The pipeline had certain issues that we now know made it particularly susceptible to ruptures, and these ruptures can occur without warning and be catastrophic,” said Providence Water Engineering Division Manager Matthew Gallant, PE. Providence Water takes vigilant measures before an issue becomes a disaster, and it embarked on a systematic and comprehensive inspection, repair, and risk assessment program.

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Freese and Nichols: A Century of Experience in Wastewater Services

David Jackson and his treatment team at one of their construction sites

F

reese and Nichols is a Texas-headquartered consulting engineering firm with operations around the nation. It was founded in 1894 and has been working with some clients, including the City of Fort Worth, since that year. Its experience in the wastewater services market spans a century as well. In this interview, David Jackson, the treatment practice leader and group manager for Freese and Nichols’s North Texas water and wastewater treatment group, tells Municipal Water Leader about how that wastewater practice has developed in recent decades, highlights important recent projects, and explains the importance of Freese and Nichols’s ethic of client service.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

20 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Municipal Water Leader: Would you introduce Freese and Nichols as a company?

David Jackson: Freese and Nichols was established in 1894 primarily as a water services consulting firm. Since the beginning, we’ve had a culture of client service. That is the foundation of our company’s hedgehog concept, which is to be the best in the world at client service. We focus on building long-term relationships with our clients.

Today, we have expanded and are now a water and civil infrastructure firm. The easiest way to describe our work municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF FREESE AND NICHOLS.

David Jackson: I graduated from Texas A&M University with a bachelor’s and a master’s in civil environmental engineering. Upon graduation, I had a few opportunities with consulting firms in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, which is where I grew up. I had fallen in love with the water and environmental business when I was in college, so I was looking at firms that focused on that field. I had an opportunity to interview with Bob Pence at Freese and Nichols, who later became the president and CEO of the

company. I was fortunate enough to be hired in 1993 and to learn from Bob and many other mentors.

I moved through the ranks of the company, holding the positions of engineer, project manager, and then associate.

I eventually began managing my own team of treatment engineers in our Dallas office. Currently, I am Freese and Nichols’s practice leader for water and wastewater treatment. The main part of the job is to help groups that do treatment work all across the country develop their business and their people, to help them coordinate their needs for projects, and to maintain quality across multiple regions within our discipline.

ADVERTISEMENT today is to say that we help cities, municipal clients, and state and federal agencies build water infrastructure and municipal infrastructure to help cities grow and maintain their services to their citizens. With a little under 1,000 employees, we offer a wide variety of services in consulting with the exception of surveying.

We are headquartered in Fort Worth, and for many decades, the vast majority of our work was centered in Texas.

Over the last two decades, we’ve really started to branch out, and today, in addition to our offices in Texas, we have offices in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, New Mexico, North Carolina, and Oklahoma.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about Freese and Nichols’s wastewater services.

David Jackson: Water and wastewater treatment were some of the very first services offered by the firm, and we have maintained that practice throughout our entire 126-year history. On the wastewater side in particular, we help our clients and communities create clean water from wastewater.

We work primarily with municipal, rather than industrial, wastewater. We help communities design facilities that remove pollutants from wastewater and generate clean water that is then either reused or returned to the environment. On the water treatment side, we help cities provide safe drinking water by designing large-scale water purification factories.

Municipal Water Leader: What percentage of Freese and Nichols’s business is accounted for by wastewater?

David Jackson: So far, I’ve only really touched on the treatment side of wastewater, but there are a lot of additional disciplines within the company that deal with it. We have a master-planning team that helps our clients master their wastewater infrastructure. We have utilities teams that help our clients move wastewater to where it needs to be. You have to have pump stations and pipelines to be able to convey the sewage that a city creates to the locations where it can be processed, treated, and cleaned back up. There are a lot of other subdisciplines within our organization that support that.

We have electrical, structural, and architectural groups that help us design and build these facilities. Water and wastewater in general are fairly evenly balanced in terms of how much of the company’s business they make up; together, they make up more than half the company’s business.

Municipal Water Leader: In addition to consulting, design work, and master planning, do you help to manage the construction itself?

David Jackson: Yes, we do. We’re not a construction firm, so we don’t lay concrete or install equipment, but we provide construction management and program management services to our clients. That typically involves serving as the municipalwaterleader.com

owner’s representative by reviewing the work of a contractor, doing day-to-day inspections of what is being constructed in the field, reviewing contractor submissions, and making sure that the project is in conformity with the general requirements of our design. After construction is complete, we support our client with startup services and offer assistance they may need to bring these new systems online and incorporate them into their operations.

Municipal Water Leader: Are your clients for wastewater projects mostly municipal agencies?

David Jackson: Most of them are cities and municipalities.

In states like Georgia and Florida, we do a lot of work for counties as well. Another big portion of our work is for water districts and river authorities, which are primarily state agencies and frequently own their own wholesale infrastructure for water and wastewater treatment.

Municipal Water Leader: How have your wastewater services changed over the history of the firm?

David Jackson: Let me narrow that down a little to the production of clean water from wastewater. Some of the firm’s earliest work concerned helping cities take waste and return it to the water environment without impinging on the environment. We have come a long way from the early 1900s to where we are today in terms of the quality of the water that we can produce and the safety of that water in the public environment.

The primary focus of water treatment in the United States from the beginning of the 20th century up to the Clean Water Act of 1972 was to partially remove the major pollutants from water and then to return it to the environment. The Clean Water Act set a different standard for what should be expected for the clean water environment and how to measure the performance of treatment facilities. That was a game changer for Freese and Nichols. It allowed the industry to develop specific countermeasures to remove pollutants and achieve a water quality far superior to what had previously been mandated. Everybody was now held to the same standards.

Over the last several decades, we’ve discovered that our technology and capabilities have advanced so far that we can now view wastewater as a resource. Other resources besides water can be safely recovered and reused from wastewater, including phosphorus and nitrogen, which are natural fertilizers with a finite global supply. There’s been a lot of discussion nationally about the advancement of biosolids treatment. We have the technology to make a safe, highquality fertilizer out of what used to be human waste. This is similar to composting of wastes and other activities that have been common practice for decades.

Finally, wastewater can be a source of energy. The natural processes that we use in the treatment of domestic sewage generates methane gas, which can be harvested, cleaned up, November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT and used to power facilities—even the wastewater treatment plants themselves. In some cases, it can even be placed back into compressed natural gas pipelines to fuel vehicles or serve other energy demands.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about some of your recent wastewater projects.

David Jackson: One of the more seminal projects was developed and led by the Colorado River Municipal Water District in Big Spring, Texas. It was and remains the first operating direct potable reuse facility in North America.

The facility purifies treated effluent diverted from a local wastewater treatment plant, which typically would be sent back into a river or a lake; blends it in a pipeline with raw water from one of the district’s surface water reservoirs; and sends it to its municipal customers for further purification at their water treatment plant prior to use.

To harvest water directly from a wastewater plant and use it without first discharging it into a natural environment, we have to engineer that water to a much greater level of purity than it would have achieved in the natural environment. We do that because we want to make sure that we are not only addressing the potential for acute problems in the water that can make people ill, particularly viruses, giardia, or cryptosporidium, but also looking at the long-term safety of the purified water. We want to make sure that there are no metals, salts, or endocrine-disrupting compounds in the water.

This requires an additional treatment sequence called full advanced technology (FAT), which is what the facility in Big Spring does. FAT takes the water that comes from the plant; runs it through a microfiltration process, which is typically used in water treatment for drinking water systems; purifies it even further through a reverse osmosis system; and then uses an advanced oxidant—UV-hydrogen peroxide, in this case—to further purify and oxidize any materials in the water.

All that is done before the water is blended with the other water supplies and then treated again by the conventional water treatment plant. The Colorado River Municipal Water District has proven over many years and with the many millions of gallons of water recovered from this facility that it can treat that water safely and return it to its supplies.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about some recent projects in which Freese and Nichols’s commitment to client service played a particularly important role?

22 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Freese and Nichols has been involved in many of the major treatment facility improvement projects at that plant over the last seven decades.

Another good example is our relationship with the Trinity River Authority of Texas (TRA). Our nearly fourdecade relationship with TRA has primarily focused on the authority’s wastewater treatment needs. It is a great client that I have the privilege of working with on multiple treatment plants on a daily basis. That is all thanks to the trust that we built with that client since the 1980s.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about your approach to workforce development?

David Jackson: There are a lot of folks retiring from our industry and fewer coming in than we would like. The water and wastewater treatment industry represents a great opportunity for our high school and college graduates, and the industry needs to be doing a better job of communicating that. We need to preserve institutional knowledge by teaching others and preserving institutional knowledge through asset management programs and the knowledge databases of organizations like the Water Environment Federation and the American Water Works Association.

In particular, the people who are actually operating our water and wastewater treatment facilities are the unsung heroes of the water environment. These are people who do jobs that are frequently very dirty and that many of us are glad somebody else does for us, but they don’t always receive the same level of respect and appreciation that people in in other industries do. We need to value, recognize, and reward these professionals. Freese and Nichols as a firm and I personally appreciate the dedication with which these individuals create purified drinking water and protect our water environment through our wastewater services. M David Jackson is the treatment practice leader and group manager for Freese and Nichols’s North Texas water and wastewater treatment group. He can be contacted at david.jackson@freese.com.

municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF FREESE AND NICHOLS.

David Jackson: That could be said of just about every project I’m currently involved in. We have been working with some of our clients for well over a century. The city of Fort Worth is a fine example of that. We’re currently doing two projects in Fort Worth’s Village Creek Water Resource Recovery Facility. Our relationship with Fort Worth goes back to 1894—it was one of our first clients—and our relationship with Village Creek goes back to the 1950s.

Fort Worth’s Village Creek Water Resource Recovery Facility.

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Storm Water Capture and Reuse at San Diego International Airport

The San Diego International Airport.

O

ver the past few years, San Diego International Airport has implemented several water reuse and conservation programs that are saving potable water, reducing runoff, and protecting the environment. These projects have been recognized with several Environmental Excellence Awards from the Industrial Environmental Association. In this interview, Richard Gilb, one of the airport’s managers for environmental affairs, tells Municipal Water Leader about the details of its ambitious projects.

Richard Gilb: I have a bachelor of science in geology from the University of Cincinnati and a master’s in public health from San Diego State University with an emphasis in environmental health. My master’s thesis involved storm water pollution.

I’ve been working with storm water since the early 1990s, and I have 30 years of experience with storm water, solid waste, hazardous materials, and site assessment and mitigation. I spent 10 years with the County of San Diego Department of Environmental Health and 2 years with the Port of San Diego.

26 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about San Diego International Airport.

Richard Gilb: San Diego International Airport is about a mile north of downtown San Diego and sits on 661 acres— just over a square mile. It is not directly on the San Diego Bay, but it’s across the street from it. We have one runway, which is the busiest single runway in the United States. We have 51 gates and had over 25 million passengers last year.

Before the COVID‑19 pandemic, we had aircraft landing or taking off about every 3 minutes, and 68,000 passengers passing through the airport every day.

The San Diego County Regional Airport Authority, which owns and operations the airport, has a little more than 400 employees, while around 9,000 additional people work for airlines, concessions, or other operations at the airport. We drive a $12 billion local economic engine.

(These numbers are all prepandemic.) municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SAN DIEGO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

For the last 17 years, I’ve been a manager at the airport, managing all aspects of regulatory compliance, whether related to air, water, waste, or endangered species.

ADVERTISEMENT We have about 20 acres of endangered species habitat on our land. We also have the first and only Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum airport terminal in the world.

Municipal Water Leader: Where does the airport get its potable and nonpotable water, and where does it send its wastewater?

Richard Gilb: Almost all the potable water in San Diego is imported; only 17 percent is local. All the water the airport uses is potable, but approximately 80 percent of it is used for nonpotable purposes. There is no recycled water source in the vicinity of the airport. That’s why we’re trying to change our operations a little. After the California drought began in 2015, we wrote a water stewardship plan, which is now part of our sustainability efforts. Some of the high-level goals in that plan are to eliminate storm water discharges by 2035 and to use no potable water for nonpotable applications by 2035. By eliminating storm water discharges, we mean that we’ll capture the water from 2‑year storm events, which for us is about a half inch of rain in 24 hours.

Capturing and reusing storm water will help us eliminate the use of potable water for nonpotable purposes.

Our wastewater goes to the Metropolitan Wastewater District, an arm of the City of San Diego, which performs advanced primary treatment before it discharges the treated water into the ocean through a deep-water outfall.

be able to capture 2 million gallons of water a year. The storm water runoff that requires treatment is initially held behind a weir within the storm drain system. Larger storms will overtop the weir, but the water from small storms is held behind it and is pumped into an oil/water separator. Then it goes into a wet well to make the pumping a little more efficient. It goes through a series of high-rate media filters; is treated with ultraviolet light; is stored in an 8,500‑gallon tank; and then is pumped to a central utility plant, where it’s used in the cooling towers for our heating, ventilation, and air conditioning system. Those cooling towers use an average of 35,000 gallons of city potable water every day to cool the terminals. The central utility plant uses an average of 16 million gallons a year. If we can use reused rainwater for that, we can save 2 million gallons of potable water a year.

One of the other benefits of capturing and reusing rainwater on site is that it helps avoid getting wrapped up in any total maximum daily loads (TMDLs) applicable to San Diego Bay. We are not currently facing any TMDLs, and we want to keep it that way.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about the storm water control challenges the airport faces and the actions it has taken to address the issue.

Richard Gilb: A couple of things were coming together all at once in 2016. The drought was still hitting us, and there were some new permitting requirements under our municipal separate storm sewer systems (MS4) permit that required the assessment of water quality impacts through a hierarchy of treatment controls for storm water discharges from new developments. We were also about to build a new parking structure. According to the permit, we had to keep storm water on site, which means that we needed to infiltrate it or capture and reuse it.

Infiltration is not ideal for us because the whole airport sits on a mudflat that has been filled in with bay mud, and its infiltration rates are poor. We decided that we might be able to pull off capture and reuse with this new parking structure. In order to capture the water from a 2‑year storm on a 7.6‑acre parking structure, we needed about 100,000 gallons of storage. There were going to be storm drainpipes under the structure itself anyway, and by increasing their size from 24 inches in diameter to 36, we were able to create that volume of storage.

This system was commissioned in 2018 when the parking structure opened. If we get an average amount of rain, we should municipalwaterleader.com

The San Diego International Airport and the San Diego Bay, seen from above.

Once we installed water capture and reuse infrastructure in this parking structure, we started drawing up a master plan for storm water capture. We worked with the engineering firm AECOM, using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Storm Water Management Model, and tried to identify the areas of the airport facility from which we could efficiently and cost-effectively capture and reuse rainwater. We decided that we were able to build a system that could capture rainwater from approximately 200 of the 661 total acres of the airport’s footprint.

The system that was proposed for the 200 acres involved two large underground basins or cisterns, initially envisioned at 3 million gallons each, and an open-bottom infiltration area that would have covered about 10 acres and given us another 3 million gallons’ worth of storage. Even though our infiltration rates are poor, we do have some infiltration capabilities, particularly if water is spread over a large enough area over a long enough time period.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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ADVERTISEMENT We are now planning to build a new terminal, and because we’re a highly developed facility with little free space, we need to first get some other structures out of the way. These relocated facilities are subject to the MS4 permit’s requirement that new developments need to capture or infiltrate storm water on site.

To comply with the regulations, we are about to complete the construction of the first 3‑million-gallon cistern, which is located on the north side of the airport. Eighty acres of airport property should drain into it in its final form. We hope to use the water it captures to wash cars at the rental car facility right across the street, where approximately 4,000 cars are washed every day (the figure comes from before the pandemic).

The second 3‑million-gallon system will be on the south side, near where we want to build the new terminal. That water will be pumped to the same treatment system at the central plant described earlier. The treatment system is oversized, so it can handle more water. As I mentioned,

plugs into our power system so that it doesn’t have to run its own little jet-fuel-powered engine on the back of the plane. We also provide air conditioning that can be pumped into the plane. The air conditioning units we use to do this are fairly large. They hang off the jet bridges and create condensate. During the 2015 drought, we realized that we could capture this condensate, so we took a hose and a pump and ran it into a 55‑gallon drum. We now use 275‑gallon totes to capture condensate from 16 jet bridges (down from 19 before the pandemic). Most of the condensate is used to wash sidewalks, but we’ve also developed wash facilities to clean trash cans or floor mats. Once it gets too greasy, the water is discharged to the sanitary sewer. The current system is labor intensive, since we have to move the water from the drums and totes after capturing it. We hope that, in our new terminal, we can come up with a better system.

The condensate water from the air conditioning units is extremely pure. Last August, we worked with Ballast Point Brewing to make SAN Test Pilot, a beer brewed with condensate that was collected on airport property. It was sold at Ballast Point’s locations in December 2019.

Municipal Water Leader: Is flooding from storm surge also a problem for the airport?

The San Diego International Airport has the busiest single runway in the United States.

28 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Municipal Water Leader: Is there any concern about precipitation runoff from the airport that contains jet fuel or other specific pollutants?

Richard Gilb: Yes. Because we’ve been subject to the MS4 permit since the mid-1990s and are also subject to the state general industrial permit—much like the EPA’s multisector permit—we have to sample at least four storm events at every outfall every year. Over the last 20 years, we have realized that our main issues concern heavy metals like copper and zinc. Those materials come off the tires and brake pads of aircraft in the touchdown zone on the runway and from all the vehicles that are moving around. We also municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE SAN DIEGO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT.

we’re currently only getting about 2 million gallons of rainwater a year off the parking structure’s capture and reuse system, and the central plant is consuming approximately 16 million gallons of potable water annually, so we want to increase the amount of captured storm water being used to offset the potable water. We’re pretty sure we can increase it by at least 5 million gallons per year. We’re also thinking that we’d like to double plumb the new terminal so that we can use some of this water to flush toilets.

That’s the grand scheme for storm water. There are some issues in front of us. Currently, there is no authority that is willing give us a permit to use captured storm water to flush toilets, but the State of California is moving in the direction of allowing these types of uses. Without a new permitting process to flush toilets, we would need to carry out E. coli testing on an almost-daily basis just to flush toilets with storm water, which would probably be cost prohibitive.

One of our sustainability measures related to greenhouse gas emissions is that, when a plane pulls up to the gate, it

Richard Gilb: Not really. We’re subject to the California Coastal Commission, which requires all new development to consider the potential effects of climate change.

Through our climate resiliency plan, which is part of our sustainability management program, we require all our critical infrastructure to be at an elevation of 14 feet above sea level. This applies to generators and any sort of electrical connection. We have looked at flooding at the airport based on what the state is predicting by the year 2100— approximately 5 feet of sea-level rise—and we think we can manage most of the expected flooding issues. Localized flooding will likely close the roads to the airport before affecting the facilities of the airport itself. Since we’re not right on the San Diego Bay, we’re trying to collaborate with the City of San Diego, the Port of San Diego, and even the Navy on long-term efforts. We are all in this together.

ADVERTISEMENT have a lot of chain link fencing around the facility, which sheds metals as well. We’re trying to eventually retrofit it with vinyl or enamel covering to help with this problem.

Jet fuel is not really an issue, even though we generally have half a million gallons of jet fuel moving around the airfield every day (the figure comes from before the pandemic). We’ve only had three major spills in the past 25 years. Only one airline at our airport does any deicing, and it is a fairly minor process—not like the major deicing efforts needed at other airports. It’s done right at the gate with a device similar to those used to spray pesticides. The excess chemicals are swept up with a little zamboni.

Municipal Water Leader: What is the motivation for reducing the nonpotable use of potable water? Is that primarily to reduce the cost of purchasing water, or are there environmental reasons?

Richard Gilb: It is to be good environmental stewards.

The board and my department pushed for the policy because sustainability is a way to future-proof yourself from regulations. Our policy states that all our new structures have to be at least LEED Silver certified, but every project we’ve done so far has been LEED Gold or better.

Municipal Water Leader: What advice do you have for other airports around the nation that are dealing with similar storm water, conservation, and water reuse issues?

Richard Gilb: Take the time to come up with a plan for what you think you can do and what you would like to do. That certainly helped us. We try to sit down at least once every 4 months and see where we are. It helps to get in front of our engineers and design teams and remind them that we have these goals. There’s a lot of discussion between airports, so just keep your ear to the ground. If somebody else is doing it, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t at least evaluate it. M Richard Gilb is the San Diego International Airport’s manager for planning and environmental affairs.

He can be contacted at rgilb@san.org.

Municipal Water Leader: When did the airport establish a formal sustainability policy, and why?

Richard Gilb: It was first adopted by the airport authority board in 2008 and has been tweaked slightly since then.

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THE INNOVATORS

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KETOS: Delivering Intelligence and Analytics for the Water Industry

The KETOS Wave device.

K

ETOS is an award-winning water intelligence and analytics company that aims to empower municipal, industrial, and agricultural water users by providing them the insight necessary to make data-driven decisions in their daily operations.

It charges customers a flat service fee to install and maintain a fully integrated proprietary hardware and software stack that provides real-time intelligence related to the quality and quantity of water that is making its way through their systems at various critical points. In this interview, KETOS Founder and CEO Meena Sankaran tells Municipal Water Leader about the company’s technology and how it solves long-standing water industry pain points.

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

34 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your company, KETOS. Meena Sankaran: I founded KETOS in 2015. My thesis always has been that you only start a company when you know you’re solving a clear pain point and are adding value for customers.

KETOS is a water intelligence company that enables operators to make data-driven decisions in their daily operations. Our target customers are industrial, municipal, municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF KETOS.

Meena Sankaran: I grew up in India and experienced what a good 70 percent of the world experiences when it comes to water: a limited supply of unsafe water. We only had a couple hours of water supply a day for the majority of the years I was growing up. There were also questions of affordability when it came to purchasing water filters. Under circumstances like that, you are more conscious about how you protect, preserve, and use such a precious resource.

I studied electronics and communications engineering in India and came to the United States to pursue my graduate degree in electrical engineering. The first 16 years of my career were heavily focused on datacenters, infrastructure, and networking. I felt that my efforts were geared toward improving the companies that I worked for, but I never felt that I was leveraging technology toward an application with a broader social importance or addressing a dire need. That desire for a mission-driven culture is at the core of why the seed of KETOS was planted and why solving an important problem, no matter how hard the challenge, was something I didn’t hesitate to embark on.

ADVERTISEMENT and agricultural entities for which understanding water analytics in real time can be transformational. The water industry is used to siloed purchases, vendor-oriented decisionmaking, and point solutions that require high capital investments and the labor-intensive maintenance of specialized equipment. We, by contrast, want to shift people’s mindset to thinking that water testing doesn’t have to be cost prohibitive. Our goal has been to offer a vertically integrated stack with intelligent hardware, stable connectivity infrastructure, an interactive software platform, and hasslefree services, all for a predictable, flat service fee. We’re not giving our customers a piece of hardware and leaving it up to their operators to figure out how to use it, manage it, calibrate it, clean it, process its tests, and use its data. Instead, we set up a complete communications stack with the hardware sensor node deployed at the customer’s preferred location, giving them a comprehensive, robust platform that analyzes water quality data at the parts-per-billion (ppb) level. Our goal is not to make water operators into technologists, but to allow them to be the experts they are, with us as the technologists who empower them.

The last 5 years have been quite a journey. Our team includes around 50 Ketonians, and even prior to the COVID‑19 pandemic, we were geographically dispersed, with employees in 13 or 14 U.S. states. We’re headquartered near Santa Clara, California, and our core engineering team and research and development lab are here as well. Our manufacturing, building, and testing setup is located in the United States, and we are conscious of how our supply chain and manufacturing quality can be upheld at the highest caliber while focusing on solving a water quality problem.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you describe the pain point you mentioned earlier and explain how your technology helps to overcome it?

Meena Sankaran: There are several filtration, water remediation, and water treatment companies out there, but I saw a big gap in how monitoring was done. Compared to the power, transportation, and energy grid industries, the water industry is lagging behind in terms of technology adoption. It’s not because the technology doesn’t exist; it has more to do policies and mindsets.

Our focus is water monitoring—not just sensing, but detection, data collection, and analysis as well: everything that is needed to provide the customer the data they need to make an actionable decision. There are two sides of water monitoring. There’s efficiency and quantitative monitoring, which covers variables like flow, pressure, and smart distribution grids. Then there is qualitative monitoring, which covers variables like water quality, water composition, and water safety. I look at these as the yin and yang of water management. If you only focus on water efficiency, you miss out on water quality, and if you only focus on water quality, you lose your water. In the United States, 14 percent municipalwaterleader.com

THE INNOVATORS

of treated water is lost in leaks alone. Both aspects are important and need to be monitored in real time.

KETOS has two solutions: one that addresses smart water distribution and efficiency management and one that addresses smart water safety grid management. The KETOS Wave measures water efficiency and water distribution, detecting anomalies in flow and pressure and sensing leaks at a single location or across a distributed network. The KETOS Shield is a holistic solution that addresses water safety and smart water management by sensing data for over 20 water quality parameters without compromising the specificity, sensitivity, and precision demanded by industrystandard labs. In addition, the KETOS Shield stores, analyzes, and reports data in a robust analytics platform and alerts users in real time about any issues that arise while also providing advanced diagnostics and maintenance-related predictions using an advanced layer of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The end goal is to provide the operational intelligence with water data as a foundation for nutritional management, chemical treatment, and the creation of digital twins to help enhance diagnostics and insights for each of our target customer verticals.

Municipal Water Leader: How does the KETOS Shield differ from conventional water quality monitoring systems?

Meena Sankaran: There are a lot of single-parameter or multiparameter probes manufactured by legacy companies on the market that can provide environmental data about things like pH, electrical conductivity, or turbidity. However, if you need to test for heavy-metal toxins in an autonomous manner without experiencing any data drift over time, you have to go to the lab for every single test, which involves labor. Even when you have online analyzers and probes, somebody still needs to be in the lab calibrating, cleaning, and maintaining these systems on a weekly basis. On top of that, you also need to buy all the consumables for this equipment. Your operational expenses include lab costs, labor costs, material costs, and the time and effort needed to manage all this equipment. This is all in addition to the capital expenditure required to purchase the equipment upfront with a limited shelf life and fixed capabilities of the system itself.

Our system addresses these issues with what I call the four A’s: It’s fully autonomous; it has lab-precision accuracy; it’s affordable, since there is no capital purchase; and it provides actionable analytics. Our model allows the customer the flexibility to choose which parameters they want to measure from a continuously growing menu of constituents within a single system. They have the ability to choose what they want to test and how often, all while operating the system from a mobile phone. The system has 24/7 remote monitoring and can give threshold-based alerts. In terms of automation, our system self-cleans and self-calibrates after every experiment. That’s one of the reasons why our data degradation rate is 0 percent. In terms of accuracy, we’ve November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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THE INNOVATORS

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The KETOS Shield device.

36 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | November/December 2020

Municipal Water Leader: KETOS Shield involves both proprietary hardware and software, correct?

Meena Sankaran: Correct. We’ve been issued several patents already in different countries.

Municipal Water Leader: What kinds of water can KETOS Shield monitor?

Meena Sankaran: Many existing probes on the market need to be calibrated on a weekly basis and can only monitor a fixed source of water. Our system can monitor drinking water; treated water; groundwater, including well water; produced water; and in some cases, surface water, such as river water. We don’t monitor sewage or water with heavy suspended solids.

We are compliant with the EPA’s data integrity standards.

KETOS reports are directly accepted by some environmental agencies and are in review with a few others. We’re also working to secure additional compliance approvals on both the state and federal levels for wastewater and drinking water testing.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you describe the KETOS Shield system in physical terms? Does it involve multiple probes, or just one system? municipalwaterleader.com

PHOTOS COURTESY OF KETOS.

had extensive third-party validation of our results, and we encourage our customers to do third-party validation as well.

We have a 100 percent service-based model, so no capital purchases are needed. Customers pay a flat service fee that does not change, regardless of how often they test, how much they test, and how many parameters they test. We also do the setup, the ongoing maintenance, and any surprise service visits that might be required. All the customer needs to focus on is how to use the data in their business operations. We save the customer costs on lab, labor, material, and overall operational efficiency.

KETOS Shield can monitor water for things like lead, copper, cadmium, arsenic, manganese, nitrates, boron, dissolved silica, and floating calcium. We’re now starting to monitor selenium, iron, mercury, and zinc. We are still researching bacterial testing, so that still needs to be done in the lab, but our autonomous solution can test for inorganics, heavy metals, nutrients, and other environmental parameters.

Precision matters. Our results are within 10 percent of what any lab offers. In some parameters, we even get to within 3–5 percent. We can measure most metals at levels as low as 1 ppb. Most U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limits are set at levels around 10–15 ppb, so that level of sensitivity is compelling to customers.

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THE INNOVATORS

Meena Sankaran: The KETOS Shield solution is a single modular system. The unit is about 24 inches by 18 inches and weighs about 50 pounds. It can be mounted indoors or outdoors. If it’s outdoors, we will put it in a secure, weather-proof cabinet. It can be placed by the intake of a municipal water treatment plant, by the effluent discharge, or both. If you monitor both the intake and the discharge, you can get a strong sense of how well the water has been treated and whether it complies with regulatory requirements or internal process-control needs. Wholesale water suppliers that supply water to cities usually have one system per well so that they can continuously monitor their groundwater quality.

or even automate them in real time. For example, our KETOS Wave product detects leaks in real time and can shut off a pipe if it is leaking remotely from a mobile app. A comprehensive use of solutions like this can automatically prevent disease outbreaks and keep cities safe if the composition of water is measured and proactively well understood.

We’ve been fortunate enough to receive several awards, including the Smart 50 Awards—KETOS was named among the top 50 local Smart City technologies. In addition, KETOS was named the recipient of distinction in the category of 2020 breakthrough technology company of the year at the Global Water Awards.

Municipal Water Leader: Would you tell us about some of the municipal use cases of your system?

Municipal Water Leader: What are your prospects for growth?

Meena Sankaran: One of our customers is Southern Nevada Water Authority, a foresighted agency that is an early adopter of new technology. It has been using the KETOS Shield to monitor arsenic and chromium and understand how well its arsenic removal system is working. It has also used another Shield to actively monitor and understand variations in nitrate levels.

We’re currently in conversations with at least 40 utilities that are thinking about how to deploy the KETOS solution in their water treatment plants, usually for water reuse.

Other common applications that are of interest to municipalities include lead testing, corrosion testing in distribution systems, and arsenic and nitrate monitoring in wells. If the KETOS system is deployed in a distribution grid with multiple units, we can identify the region that is responsible for lead toxicity. That enables a focused, targeted repair of that section of piping and eliminates the need to spend millions of dollars replacing an entire city’s piping infrastructure.

Another interesting application we’ve seen is that utilities will use our system to gain a more precise knowledge of other utilities they are considering purchasing. Because of specific legal and liability concerns, they want to know how good a utility is and what the quality of its water is before a proposed merger.

Meena Sankaran: We’ve raised several iterations of funding. We have a significant number of investors and advisors, a large ecosystem of supporters, and strong customer champions. Our KETOS Shield system has been deployed in 13 U.S. states and in Canada. The KETOS Wave solution has been deployed in India, Mexico, and the United States. We are actively working on several international opportunities for future growth in countries including Australia, India, Israel, Singapore, the UK, and countries in Latin America.

Municipal Water Leader: What is your vision for the future of KETOS? Meena Sankaran: The COVID‑19 pandemic has brought about a focus on how utilities can help people understand public health. KETOS’s vision has always been to let data lead the way for an operator to help their local community. How do we make data-driven decisions to potentially prevent a disease outbreak? We’re well on our way to developing the diagnostics, the analytics, and the intelligence to do that. The adoption and deployment of millions of our sensor nodes and systems will pave the path for a breadth of data intelligence that doesn’t exist today, opening limitless possibilities ahead for all involved in this industry. M

Municipal Water Leader: How can KETOS’s technology help enable the smart city concept?

Meena Sankaran: Our system helps customers to understand a resource anytime and anywhere and to take proactive actions as a result. That’s fundamentally what smart resource management means. In order to make water a smart resource, you need to have the infrastructure to detect, collect, transmit, and analyze data in a meaningful way so that you can take appropriate management actions

municipalwaterleader.com

Meena Sankaran is the founder and CEO of KETOS. She can be contacted at meena@ketos.co.

November/December 2020 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER

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D2T210463

09/20

Upcoming Events November 5 Columbia Basin Development League, Annual Meeting and Conference (virtual) CANCELED: November 9–10 Kansas Governor’s Water Conference, Wichita, KS November 9, 10, 12 National Water Resources Association, 89th Annual Conference (virtual) November 10–11 American Water Works Association and Smart Water Networks Forum, International Smart Water Symposium (virtual) CANCELED: November 15–19 American Water Works Association, Water Quality Technology Conference and Exposition, Schaumburg, IL December 1–3 Oregon Water Resources Congress, Annual Conference, Hood River, OR December 2-3 Association of California Water Agencies, Fall Conference and Exhibition (virtual) December 2–4 Washington State Water Resources Association, Annual Conference (virtual) December 8–10 National Ground Water Association, Groundwater Week, Las Vegas, NV (virtual option) December 8–11 North Dakota Water Users Association, 57th Annual Joint North Dakota and Upper Missouri Water Convention and Irrigation Workshop (virtual) CANCELED: December 14–16 Colorado River Water Users Association, Annual Conference, Las Vegas, NV January (date TBD) National Water Resources Association, Leadership Forum (virtual) January (date TBD) Groundwater Management Districts Association, Winter Conference January (date TBD) Irrigation Leader, Operations and Management Training Workshop and Tour, Palm Springs, CA January 27 Nebraska Water Resources Association, Legislative Forum, Lincoln, NE January 21–23 U.S. Conference of Mayors, 89th Winter Meeting, Washington, DC January 25–28 Nevada Water Resources Association, Annual Conference (virtual) January 27–29 Texas Ground Water Association, Annual Convention and Trade Show, San Marcos, TX January 29–31 Colorado Water Congress, Annual Convention, Aurora, CO

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