Water Supplies In the Yukon
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Leadership with Water-Energy Nexus?
In our prior blog discussions the theme has been leadership. Vision is needed from leaders. In the water industry that vision has to do with sustainability in light of competing interests for water supplies, completion for funds, maintaining infrastructure and communicating the importance of water to customers. The need to fully to optimize management of water resources has been identified. The argument goes like this. Changes to the terrestrial surface decrease available recharge to groundwater and increase runoff. Urbanization increases runoff due to imperviousness from buildings, parking lots, and roads and highways that replace forest or grassland cover, leading to runoff at a faster rate (flooding) and the inability to capture the water as easily. In rural areas, increased evapotranspiration (ET) is observed in areas with large-scale irrigation, which lowers runoff and alters regional precipitation patterns. At the same time there are four competing sectors for water: agriculture (40% in the US), power (39% in the US), urban uses (12.7%) and other. Note the ecosystem is not considered.
New water supplies often have lesser quality than existing supplies, simply because users try to pick the best water that minimizes treatment requirements. But where water supplies and/or water quality is limited, energy demands rise, often to treat that water as well as serve new customers. For many non-industrial communities, the local water and wastewater treatment facilities are among the largest power users in a community. Confounding the situation is trying to site communities where there is not water because the power industry needs water and the residents will need water. It is a viscous cycle. When you have limited water supplies, that means your development should be limited. Your population and commercial growth cannot exceed the carrying capacity of the water supply, or eventually, you will run out. Drawing water from more distant place can work for a time, but what is the long-term impact. Remember the Colorado River no longer meets the ocean. Likewise the Rio Grande is a trickle when it hits the Gulf of Mexico As engineers, we can be pretty creative in coming up with ways to transfer water, but few ask if it is a good idea.
Likewise we can come up with solutions to treat water that otherwise could not be drunk, but, that may not always be the best of ideas. Adding to the challenge is that planning by drinking water, wastewater, and electric utilities occurs separately and is not integrated. Both sectors need to manage supplies for changes in demands throughout the year, but because they are planned for and managed separately, their production and use are often at the expense of the natural environment. Conflicts will inevitably occur because separate planning occurs (for a multitude of reasons, including tradition, regulatory limitations, ease, location, limited organizational resources, governance structure, and mandated requirements). However, as demands for limited water resources continue to grow in places that are water limited, and as pressures on financial resources increase, there are benefits and synergies that can be realized from integrated planning for both water and electric utilities and for their respective stakeholders and communities. The link between energy and water is important – water efficiency can provide a large savings for consumers and the utility. As a result, there is a need to move toward long-term, integrated processes, in which these resources are recognized as all being interconnected . Only then can the challenges to fully to optimize management of water resources for all purposes be identified.
Anybody have any good examples out there?
Outlook for Utilities is Up, but Leadership needed for Infrastructure Investments
The magazine Utility Contractor suggests that 2013 may be much better than 2012 from a utility construction perspective. In Fact they suggest a 13% increase in utility construction, although the bulk of that is in the power industry, not the water industry. Their projections are for water utility infrastructure spending to remain roughly constant from 2012, a slight uptick from the recession years. At the same time, the US water infrastructure bill was suggested by Public Works magazine to exceed $1 trillion over the next 30 years, requiring over $30 billion to be spend annually on upgrades. This is more than double their estimates of current funding.. Many of these upgrades are pipe. Much of the piping infrastructure in America is over 50 years old, and the condition may be unclear (unless you dig it up, you don’t know much). But piping projects are hard to fund, because no one sees the pipe, only the failures. As time goes on, the condition continues to deteriorate.
Much of the reason that water utility infrastructure is not expected to increase is that revenues are not expected to climb significantly to allow for the expansion of capital funding despite historically low borrowing rates and lowered costs of construction. The reason: many public sector utilities, which accounts for many of the larger systems, have been caught in one or more of several traps: deferring capital to pay current expenses without raising rates, revenue losses from defaults on housing, use of utility fees to overcome ad valorem tax losses in the general fund, or political pressure to reduce rates. All four cases can be crippling to the utility because it not only removes revenues today, but likely will result in a continuing practice in the future.
The good news in the revenues are rising, and that unemployment is down nationally despite the loss of 276,000 state and local jobs in 2011. But since governments tend to lag the private sector in recovery, and we now have 34 straight months the private sector adding jobs, governments should start to see improved conditions in 2013. Salaries are up, revenues are up a little and jobs are being filled, but what does this mean to infrastructure? The question is why the projections are for no increase in spending. Water and sewer utilities owned by governments, are caught in the middle of the political process which lacks leadership. These utilities are set up as enterprise funds, whereby revenues are gained from provision of a measurable service. As a result they are designed to be operated more like a business, than a government. But if your utility funds are altered through the political process, this can frustrate the efforts to run an efficient and effective business-like organization, which may mean the status quo, which is not investments in infrastructure beyond absolutely essential and emergency measures. The question is where is the leadership to reverse this trend? Unfortunately the political leadership focus is on elections, 2 to 4 years out, not the 20 or 30 year life of the utility’s assets. As a result, short term benefits sacrifice long-term needs.
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If you are a person who wants to be a leader, you also need to think about the long-term impacts of your plans/policies and actions. How will they be perceived 10 or 20 years out? How will your decisions impact the course of the organization? For utilities how has your tenure added value to the utility, whether that value is treatment capacity, public health protection or reliability of the system. And how is it measure, since monetary value is not the only means to add value. Keep in mind no one remembers the guy who did not raise rates, only the person who did not plan to replace the infrastructure that failed. That’s a legacy leadership issue. One thing many people do not understand is that while we live in the moment, it is how people view our actions afterwards. It is why it is so easy to see leadership after the fact, but sometimes very difficult during the event. The question is, how to we overcome the restrictions caused by the 2008 recession? That’s where leadership comes to play.
SUSTAINABILITY THROUGHOUT TIME – BUT NOW WHAT?
I was cruising through Glacier Bay National Park when I wrote this blog. It was just one of those inspirational momentsl If you have never seen it, you should, especially as a water professional. The entire park is a testament to the power of water and the result of changes in climate cycles that affect the hydrologic cycle. I will post video of the journey separately, but suffice it to say that the inherent beauty of the place is difficult to describe. Needless to say with a large concentration of glaciers in the area (most retreating), there is copious amounts of water (for now). The Pacific Glacier has retreated 65 miles, yes MILES, in 300 years in part because of changes in oceanic moisture and evaporation. The native people, Tlingets, moved and survived based on glacier flows end ebbs. But that’s not my point. Seeing this much water leads to an entirely different perspective, one that is helped by Brian Fagan’s book, Elixir which outlines the history of civilizations as they were affected by harnessing of water, or the lack of ability to do so. Same thing applies to the Tlingets here.
Historically the key was to rely on surface waters where they were consistent, to manage water locally and carefully for the benefit of all, and when surface waters were not consistent enough to be reliable year after year, quanats, shallow wells and other mechanisms were used to extract water from glacial till or adjacent to rivers (riverbank filtration or infiltration galleries in today’s vernacular). Or people moved or died out. The ancient people did not have the ability to dig too deep, but were creative in means to manage available supplies.
Contrast this to today where over the last 50 years we have been able to extract water from ever expanding, generally deeper sources, but to what end? Certainly we have “managed “ surface waters, by building dams, diversions and offstream reservoirs. These supply half the potable water use in the United States and Canada as well as a lot of irrigation. But groundwater has been an increasing component. Fagan makes the point that deep groundwater sources are rarely sustainable for any period of time, and that many in the past have recognized this limitation. But have we?
Maybe not so much. A couple years ago I was at a conference out west. The session I was speaking at involved sustainable groundwater, a major issue for AWWA, ASCE, NGWA and the utilities and agricultural folks around the world. One of the speakers was a geologist with the State of Utah. Her paper concerned the issues with decreasing groundwater levels in the St. George and Cedar City, areas in southwestern Utah, where population growth is a major issue. Her point was that despite the State efforts, they had significant drawdowns across the area. Keep in mind that the USGS (Reilly, et al, 2009) had identified southwestern Utah as one of many areas across the US where long term decreasing groundwater levels. My paper was a similar issue for Florida, so I stopped partway into my paper and asked her a question: has any hydrogeologist or engineer trying to permit water in the area ever said the water supply was not sustainable?” The room got really quiet. She looked at me and said, “well, no.” In fact the audience chimed in that they had never heard this from their consultants either. The discussion was informative and interesting. Not sure I really finished my presentation because of the discussion.
To be fair, consultants are paid to solve problems, and for water supplies, this means finding groundwater and surface water limited areas like Utah when their clients request it. So you don’t expect to pay your consultant to find “no water.” But where does that lead us? The concept of sustainable yield from confined aquifer systems is based on step drawdown tests. Ignoring the details, what this constitutes is a series of short term tests of the amount of drawdown that occurs at different pumping levels. AWWA’s manual on Groundwater can give you the details, but the results are short-term and modeling long-term results requires a series of assumptions based on the step drawdown test. This is that had been submitted in support of permits in Utah (and many other places). As discussed in the conference session, clearly there is something wrong with this method of modeling and calculation because, well, the results did not match the reality. The drawdowns increased despite modeling and step drawdown tests showing the demands were sustainable. Clearly wrong. Competing interests, the need to cast a wider net, and many other issues are often not considered. The results play out throughout the world. Confined aquifers are often not sustainable, a potential problem for much of agriculture in the farm belt of the US. Are we headed the same direction as ancient people?
The good news is that these same hydrogeologists and engineers have the ability to help solve the sustainability problem. We need a new definition for “safe yield.” We need a better means to estimate leakance in aquifers. A project I did with injection wells indicated that leakance was overestimated by a factor of 1000 to 10,000, which would drastically alter the results of any model. More work needs to be undertaken here. The overdraw of confined groundwater is a potential long-term catastrophe waiting to happen. And the consequences are significant. The question is can we adapt?
But when we start to look at resource limitations, who stands up and says, this type of withdrawal is not the right answer. We need another one. Where is that leadership moment?
Leadership Part 3 Examples?
Leadership Part 3
One of the themes in the prior two posts on leadership was that leaders are defined by a vision, the people who follow the leader and the ability to market the vision. We often fail on the marketing end, especially in dealing with water and sewer infrastructure issues. We know the infrastructure is in poor condition and that billions, perhaps trillions are needed to upgrade the system to serve our needs. But pipes are hidden and parks are far more glamorous, so guess what gets funded? At least until a failure occurs.
I teach an elected officials class for water/wastewater issues. The all acknowledge that a failure o f the utility system is a huge issue and the electorate and elected officials are often looking for “the cause” or someone who is responsible. In other words, someone to fire. It is every utility director’s nightmare, and a nightmare for many elected officials as well. Yet a 4 hour outage in a year is a 99.96% success rate. My students would be raising hell with the dean and president if I failed them for only 99.96% correct answers. And rightly so. Why are utilities any different? Public health sure, but the systems can fail, and the condition that many are in warrants far more attention to potential to fail unless we can market to the public the need to invest. Yet how many city managers, elected officials and finance director acknowledge any accountability for failures? The investigation into the Walkerton Ontario failure indicated that the employees who falsified records, the governing body, the water advisory body and other officials all the way to the province had culpability in the failure of the system that made half the town sick and killed a number of residents. Utility folks need to market the need to protect public health better, to make the public understand.
Marketing is a difficult skill set. I can tell you sales in not one of my skills. Common among engineers who tend to be more technical in nature, letting the data guide us. Even so, we have successes. Think about the City of Los Angeles. The only reason large numbers of people can live in LA is the aqueducts that were started back in 1900s by William Mulholland under the guidance of Mayor Fred Eaton. The vision was to grow LA but the limitation was water supplies. The aqueducts sparked water wars (think Chinatown, the movie), and developed through the 1930s. Hetch Hetchy, over 100 miles east, was established as San Francisco’s water supply back in 1913 as well. The reservoir system continues to supply San Francisco today. Denver Water acquired and/or constructed reservoirs and tunnels to the west side of the Rockies for water supplies prior to 1940, realizing that sustained growth in the Denver area was not available east of the Rockies. . Pinellas County and Orange County California started projects to reuse treated wastewater for irrigation of private yards, and aquifer recharge in the 1970s to sustain their supplies. Sustainability of water supplies, management of water sources including wastewater and stormwater as a part of an integrated program and sustaining the financial and infrastructure condition of the utility are the long-term priorities. We need to find those visionary projects and people today.
So here’s the assignment. Let’s find where those leaders are today, and identify what makes them a leader.
Leadership Part 2
Among the many things I do is work with college seniors as they get ready to graduate and hit the job market. The changes you use in many of these students over that last year in school is often significant, and in some cases remarkable. Different students grow differently and the potential starts to appear. Some gain confidence in their skills and begin to grow into the profession. Some of these students are likely to make good leaders in the field in the future. But trying to guess which ones and why it is often a challenge. However I want them all to have some concept of what leadership is all about. For many of them, they will end up in the water/wastewater/stormwater field. They are going to have to deal with tough issues like rebuilding deteriorating infrastructure, sea level rise, climate changes, stressed water supplies, energy demands and a more demanding electorate. They will recommend increasing water and wastewater fees. But will they have the skills to encourage decision-makers to move forward with the needs of the system. You see, that’s where leadership comes into play. Often it is little things that set things into motion. Our engineers go into the world with a technical skills et, that ability to learn to solve problems with solutions. We try to encourage them to be creative. An assigned reading is “The Cult of the Mouse” by Henry Caroselli, who urges creativity above profits in the workplace. Mr. Caroselli is right in that it is creativity that allows us to come up with innovative solutions, the ones that change how we live. It is also where the patents and economic opportunities exist. America rose to greatness in the 20th century in large part because of automobiles – we figured that out and it made some many things possible. Computers became common place in the latter part of the century. We use the technology for both in the water/wastewater/stormwater industry. In fact they have made us so much more efficient that costs have not climbed as fast as they might have, which is why cable tv is normally more expensive than your water bill. Which one do you need to live? My hope is that today’s students figure out energy solutions that will carry us forward as a world leader in the 21st century. Those alternative energy options, greater efficiency of current technology. Each will allow the utility industry to improve it’s efficiency further. The City of Dania Beach built the world’s first LEED Gold water plant. That took a little vision on the part of the utility director Dominic Orlando. And a cooperative team of consultants and students. When we give these projects to young people we can be surprised because they often don’t know that “that’s not the way we do it.” Well that’s exactly what Mr. Caroselli said.
So we look for leadership. Creativity, innovation and the “Can-do” mentality are part of leadership, but not all. There is that ability to set a vision, like Mr. Orlando did in Dania. There is the ability to convince decision-makers of the wisdom of an idea, as opposed to doing like we always did to make the shareholder happy as Mr. Caroselli noted. Selling innovation is often the hard part because that’s were the costs are. But there is more. Often the selling of a good idea is difficult. You can be ridicules by the status quo. Many ideas are just lost in the shuffle because they never receive a voice.
Leadership is often not understood at the time it is occurring. Ok, maybe we figured this out when Lincoln was President, but if you read accounts of his Presidency, the early years are marked with indecision and backtracking before he got it right. Most of that is forgotten in lieu of the ultimate results. Many of the issues we face today need real leadership to create a long-term solution. The “fiscal cliff” issue is a prime example, as it the long-term need for solutions for social security, Medicare and medical costs in general. The need to fix the infrastructure that made our economy strong should be among those priorities also. Remember, we don’t remember the councilman, mayor, legislator. manager, director or President who did not raise taxes or water bills. They do remember those who solved problems
Hope you all had a great thanksgiving
While many of us enjoyed being with friends and family, enjoying good food and drink,, how many of us thought about being connected to water and sewer systems that provide safe water supplies and safe wastewater disposal? We should be thankful for this as well. The other option makes life so much harder. We should not water and wastewater for granted, but unfortunately we do.
Creating Expectations
We hear the moniker about getting the most out of your employees and staff. Business books will talk about accountability, as will politicians, but creating accountability requires a first step on the art of management. In any organization there needs to be a vision of where the organization wants to be in 5, 10 or 20 years. Then there needs to be a team of managers who buy into the vision, and implement it by securing employees who can implement it. But it does not stop there. You need to set expectations. Sounds, easy, but it is one of the issues professional employees especially complain about. Assigning work tasks and saying “get it done” is not an expectation. That’s a command. Commands work in the military, but not so much in private practice. The command and control types are notoriously difficult to work with, especially in professional and/or creative environments. Micro-managers fall into this same mode. The creative/professionals are intelligent and are looking for freedom to solve problems, usually more effectively that they can be told. Instead, what needs to be done is to create a set of expectations of what will be accomplished and timelines. Let the creative types and professionals figure out how. Provide them with the resources they need. If employees understand the expectations, and are given the ability to accomplish the goals, accomplishing them becomes an end in itself – that becomes the goal and their satisfaction. But does it work? Well, yes. I have been in organizations where the stars aligned to have a small group of manager who created and bought into a vision. We set expectations and let people accomplish them. Always faster, always less cost, and always effectively. A degree of recognition follows them. The group was easy to spot because they were accomplishing things (I should note that this does come with the price of jealousy among those who prefer to sit on the sidelines and can create some degree of subterfuge there which requires a strong leader to deal with that problem). Students work the same way – set expectations of the delivery and allow them to develop the methods to solve the problem. It is easy to see who the good engineers are, and who perhaps will be less successful.
Even easier are city and county managers, general managers and the like. New officials come into office and six month later they are complaining that the staff and manager don’t communicate with them. First response is to give them more information, which compounds the problem. Still not communicating. Every manager has one of these stories. The problem is that the new folks never revised the expectations from the past. As a result everyone operates on the last set of expectations, until new ones are established. If that never happens, well, the conflict escalates. Someone has to take the leadership role, which creates a quandary with governing boards like the ones utilities commonly deal with because these folks are generally not educated in the intricacies of the operation of the utility, and rarely have any management experience. They simply do not understand how to set reasonable expectations, to identify what is important to them and what is not, how to delegate, etc. Until a sitdown discussion of expectations of both manager and the board is developed, the potential for friction will exist. Some managers are good at recognizing and making adaptation, but most governing bodies are not. This is why it is important to develop education programs that will encourage the community, which often has better connections to the governing members than staff. So as utilities, our infrastructure is vital to the long-term development of our communities and to the public health and productivity of our residents. So how do we make governing bodies understand the need to invest in utility infrastructure when emergencies are not happening? Realizing we are all busy, we need to keep in mind that outreach is a key to creating that coalition of leadership in the community to advance the utility agenda. Again a leadership issue and the need to engage the community, something we all too often forget to do.
Planning or Just Shots in the dark…
I had an interesting email exchange with a guy in north Florida who was trying to educate the Legislature on why planners are always wrong with their projections and their studies should be ignored as a result. His specific issue was water supply, but it could have been any number of issues. His argument was that the projections for water use made in 1976 were incorrect and in fact total water demands in the State had been basically flat over that period. He’d be unhappy to know that Florida mimics the rest of the country.
Ok, I admit that in addition to being an engineer, I have a minor in planning and a degree in public administration. I attempted to communicate with him about the purpose of planning, not that it helped. Planners outline projections of what things will likely be IF not changes are made. The reason is to prompt policy or behavioral changes prior to reaching critical tipping points. The argument in 1976 was that Florida would run out of cheap water if current trends continued. In the intervening years, there have been major efforts toward water conservation, low flow bathroom fixture and major changes to irrigation practices. All of which made the water picture far better than the 1976 projection. See the planners were not wrong – the projections indicated the problem if nothing was done, and acted in part as a catalyst for change. This is what planners dealing with water supply needs, sea level rise and a host of other planning issues are supposed to do. If we understand what the potential problems are, maybe we can take action to avoid tipping points. This is not to say all projections are perfect or even correct, but the idea is to avoid reaching a point of no return. Isn’t that what smart people should do? Apparently not to the guy on the other end of the email. Happy Halloween. Er, no this was just scary because it was real!!
Sea Level Rise? Or Rising?
October is the month that brings us the astronomical tides, or locally to the coasts, the annual high, high tide. The position of the moon relative the Earth creates a slight alteration in the gravitational pull of the moon on the oceans so high tide, is, well high! If you lived in a coastal areas, what did you see? Or experience? Southeast Florida was rife with email chatter and photographs of flooded streets, yards, and canals. The City of Fort Lauderdale sent notices to residents warning them about the tides. We had no rain, just the tide coming in. These are low lying areas that 20 years ago did not flood except during storms. This is just a phenomenon that has been monitored in coastal areas over the past 5-10 years, depending on the complaints that have come into local officials.
One of the more interesting complaints I received in my career was in Hollywood Florida where a resident complained about the “fish in the street.” Sure enough, the storm drain in front of his house was connected directly to the Intracoastal waterway and the October tides had pushed the saltwater up through the catch basin into the street. Now these weren’t snook or redfish, they were little fish escaping the snook and redfish, about 3-5 inches long. Pretty funny stuff if you think about it. Realizing the problem, I called him 3 hours later and asked if the problem had been solved. He said told me I was a genius to fix that so fast. My boss told me to take advantage of luck and drop the explanation, but to design a solution (which we did). My boss was right, but the call made me more cognizant of the issue.
15 years later, I have a student developing models of what happens during the annual high and average tides, especially with respect to the potential for flooding in low lying areas where groundwater is just below the surface. His work is impressive. A lot more land, especially inland, may flood as a result of the annual tides, which are a precursor to the long term trend of rising seas. See the groundwater has a slight upward gradient as you move inland. As a result, you cannot use the tide levels to predict inland flooding, you need to add the tides on top of historical groundwater levels. Of course the wet season is the summer in Florida, so the October tides come just at the time groundwater levels are highest. But at least we can determine where the stormwater pumping improvements need to go.
Determining where stormwater pumping is needed is only part of the problem. As sea levels rise, more stormwater management will be needed and a place to put the water will become a problem. Discharging nutrient laden stormwater to tide is not a good answer when you have fragile reefs offshore. NOAA’s Florida Area Coastal Environment (FACE) Initiative outline this (see intensives study – http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/themes/CoastalRegional/projects/FACE/Publications.htm). Instead, perhaps at some point we may develop infiltration systems to capture this high water table “problem” and convert it to water supplies, solving two issues for southeast Florida. Might be 2030, but we probably should be doing some planning….
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