Mission-critital monitoring in South Carolina - Case Study

Treatment agency sees results from new monitoring system

Renewable Water Resources (ReWa) is a wastewater treatment agency in Greenville, S.C., that serves Greenville and parts of Laurens, Anderson, Pickens and Spartanburg counties in the upstate area. The utility infrastructure includes eight water resource recovery facilities that are serviced by 343 miles of interceptor lines and 60 pump stations. Effectively managing such a large network is challenging at best. Reliable communication is imperative to head off emergencies in remote locations. When an old dial-up phone system at a pump station failed due to a power outage, facility managers began to search for a more reliable way to monitor equipment.

Blake Visin, information system director with ReWa said the turning point was when a tree took out the phone and power lines at the agency’s largest pump station at Rocky Creek several years ago. A third-party contractor had failed to perform regular maintenance at the site. The station went one week without power, and the outage was not reported, which caused ReWa to lose more than 1.5 million gal of water.

“That was one of the indications that we needed to bring service back inhouse,” Visin said.

ReWa officials tried a temporary fix before pursuing a permanent solution.

“We set up a workstation with Trihedral client/server SCADA that did nothing but poll the CB4s,” Visin said. “If that workstation failed to communicate or connect within 15 minutes, it set off an alarm. That was a Band-Aid approach to a failsafe checker.”