For water utilities located in most desert regions of
the United States, the problem is finding enough resources.
For California's Eastern Metropolitan Water District,
it's deciding what to do with them all.
The EMWD encompasses some 555 square miles in the western
portion of Southern California's inland Riverside County,
extending roughly from the San Bernardino County to San
Diego County lines. The area is touched by virtually all
of Southern California's major water supply sources, including
the State Water Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct.
Such an ample supply of connections to raw water is a
hydraulic engineer's dream - allowing for endless creativity
in analyzing how to create the most cost-effective, reliable
system for future generations. For EMWD, it's a job best
managed with geoengineering technology, namely GIS combined
with advanced water modeling software.
To date, the combination of these tools had helped develop
one of the industry's most comprehensive Water Facilities
Master Plans, a plan that includes doubling the capacity
of one facility, helping the regional water authority
best locate new facilities, and introducing a highly adaptable
model capable of accommodating changes in demand, costs
and resources at a moment's notice.
GIS and then some
The EMWD, with its exceptional wealth of water sources,
currently operates 59 separate pressure zones - a vastly
more complex system than most. (The nearby Long Beach
MWD, for example, has only two zones.)
A pioneer in the field of reclaimed water, the District
has operated an extensive, interconnected reclaimed water
system for years. Today, it includes five major state-of-the-art
water reclamation facilities. To accurately predict domestic
and reclaimed water demands and sewage flows for a system
this complex, engineers rely heavily on land use and growth
projections.
Before GIS technology, melding these projections into
one expansive, revealing picture was an arduous task.
Map sub-areas were colored in by hand, based on General
Plans collected from all involved cities, counties, and
other jurisdictional agencies - each of whom employed
its own unique abbreviations, symbology, and updating
time frames. When basing a Master Plan on such an inexact
science, the tendency was to overdesign.
Even with the arrival of GIS in the early 1980s, the task
remained one of the most labor-intensive segments of master
plan development for EMWD -- that is until the advent
of H2OMAP™.
EMWD Senior Planner Ruth Newsham, P.E., M.B.A., a seasoned
pro who's witnessed the evolution of modeling software
since the 1980s, has had a front-row view of how the technology
has revolutionized water modeling. “H2OMAP™
opened up opportunities to strategize cost-effective system
improvements that never existed before,” she says.
“For example, relocating pump station facilities
is expensive and you can't change topography. But you
can adjust boundaries. Doing so can enable you to minimize
capital investment for new facilities by utilizing existing
ones more effectively.”
Using GIS and H2OMAP™, engineers can change
pressure zone boundaries virtually on-the-fly, and instantly
see how demands change, while monitoring critical service
indicators like pressure and fire flow generated by the
proposed changes. Says Newsham, “The tedious task
of adding and subtracting acres of multiple land use types,
each with its own unique usage factor, is a thing of the
past.”
As a follow-up, the EMWD looked to build on its GIS with
the power of water distribution system modeling and optimization
software - a tool capable of helping engineers and analysts
rapidly assess and compare a wide range of existing or
proposed systems under various conditions and planning
horizons, using both steady state and dynamic simulations.
In October 2001, the agency implemented H2OMAP™.
Extremely powerful, flexible, and intuitive, H2OMAP™
is a comprehensive geoengineering platform that can be
used to effortlessly read and share native GIS data, extract
pertinent modeling information, and automatically construct,
skeletonize, load, calibrate and analyze any network model
- saving time and money across the enterprise For EMWD,
it provided the opportunity to maintain a single detailed
geospatial hydraulic model of its system while quickly
developing and evaluating an array of system improvement
alternatives.
According to EMWD analysts, every change made cascades
through the entire set of projects in a tree-like structure,
eliminating the need to update multiple models each time
a change is made or a new scenario is applied. Engineers
can switch between scenarios, merge models, and compare
results instantly - an ideal framework for developing
accurate long-term Master Planning models.
Modeling the Future
Recently, Newsham put H2OMAP™ to the
ultimate test as EMWD pushed to complete a new Water Facilities
Master Plan. Thanks to spectacular advances in water modeling
technology, the large, complex one-and-a-half year project
- which would previously have been handled by a costly
outside consultant staff of substantial size (15+) - was
done completely in-house by a handful of people in the
same amount of time.
Several major changes have occurred since the agency's
last Water Facilities Master Plan (WFMP) was completed
in 1990. Most notable was the slowdown in the growth of
new commercial and residential developments, followed
by the emergence of a modest growth trend in 1996. This
new growth, coupled with an unusually high summer demand
in 2001, had underscored a number of deficiencies in the
District's distribution system and its available water
supply.
At the District's request, the Metropolitan Water District
of Southern California (MWD) agreed to increase the EMWD's
connected capacity at its Mills Filtration Plant from
155 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 300 cfs. A plan was
needed for delivering this increased supply from Mills
and expanding or replacing facilities that were now inadequate.
In addition, the MWD had delayed the design and construction
of a new filtration plant from 2005 to 2018, and the EMWD
was collaborating with them to reconsider the proposed
location of the facility.
The key goals of the new Master Plan were ambitious going
beyond the description of existing water system facilities,
historic water use, and projected future demands. This
plan was to include an evaluation of the EMWD's existing
and proposed “backbone” systems, recommend new
facilities, update the district's phased water system
improvement program, identify a strategic plan for future
sources of water supply, and determine the capital costs
of updating the Master Plan.
Even armed with the cutting-edge capabilities and speed
of H2OMAP™, the project proved to be a
massive undertaking. The modeling session, consisting
of several hundred computer runs and scenarios. lasted
nearly twenty hours. Each run was completed instantaneously
with only enough time between runs to push output data
to a recording device for documentation.
In the process, Newsham became an ardent fan of H2OMAP™
and its highly advanced capabilities. “Processing
time is instantaneous. Analysis results are displayed
graphically in any color, size, or format for any variable
- flow rate, velocity, head loss, pressure, head and water
quality. No more searching long columns of endless numbers
for anomalies and praying you didn't miss them,”
she smiles.
Even reports are generated in the format of choice. “In
the old days, developing facility costs was one of the
most nerve-wracking parts of master planning,” Newsham
remembers. “Every change - and there are always many
- meant hours of work. With tools this sophisticated,
making changes is effortless.”
If any user could put those tools to the acid test, it's
Newsham. Trained as a concert pianist, she fires off command
sequences at the speed of thought. “If anyone can
lock up a PC, it is I,” she says. “Most people
literally get dizzy watching the screen and ask to leave
for a while.” Quite unbelievably, she reports, H2OMAP™
never crashed during the entire session. “Having
worked with so many different hydraulic analysis software
products dating back to the dark ages, I was absolutely
amazed. I've never worked on a more stable system for
performing intricate runs successively, one on top of
the other, imposing maximum stress on the system. This
is by far the best-performing hydraulic analysis software
I've ever used.”
The draft Master Plan was recently released to an enthusiastic
reception, with many comments on the comprehensiveness
of the document and its many graphs, tables, and figures.
The coup d'état, however, was the award-winning
four- by five-foot map generated for the project by Charles
Crider, an integral member of the Master Plan development
team who provided all GIS services during the project.
To create it, Crider exported finalized capital improvement
projects totaling millions of dollars directly from H2OMAP™
into ArcView (ESRI, Redlands, California), color-coded
them by phasing, and overlaid them onto a highly detailed
set of over 300 aerial photographs joined as one. The
stunning result depicts existing facilities of the complex
network of pipelines, including nearly a hundred storage
reservoirs and as many pump stations.
After some prodding by coworkers who had witnessed its
creation, Crider entered the map in the annual Map Gallery
competition at the International ESRI Conference in July
2002. To the delight of the entire team, the entry won
the coveted People's Choice Award, which honors the submission
voted best overall by conference attendees - in this case,
over 12,000 professionals from all over the world. Crider
has since been besieged with requests to generate similar
maps for the many other systems (groundwater, reclaimed,
sanitary sewer, etc.) managed by EMWD. But then, fame
does have its price. |
