Community Compliance
There’s more to illicit discharge detection than just finding the culprits.
“They do it at night or on the weekends” was a statement we heard often when we were asking about the people knowingly responsible for illicit discharges. “That’s when they think there are no inspectors around.” We have been told frequently that education is the answer to the problem of illicit discharges, and that implies education of the general public. It means telling them, for example, that a quart of used motor oil can pollute as much as a quarter of a million gallons of good water.
Does anybody get caught? Is it a losing battle for those of us committed to clean water and healthy communities? Yes and no. We chose two cases where violations have been found and the violators consented to pay. The first concerns the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) and contractor Scarsella Brothers Inc. There were violations of the Clean Water Act during the construction of the Bellgrove-Mica realignment of Highway 95. The amount that was agreed on for payment was $895,000, reported the Justice Department and the USEPA on May 3, 2006. The settlement concluded a lawsuit (begun in 2004) alleging that Scarsella Brothers and ITD failed to provide adequate stormwater controls for a large highway project that later deposited tons of sediment in Mica Creek. The creek flows into Mica Bay in Lake Coeur d’Alene. Apart from the financial penalties, ITD and Scarsella Brothers agreed to send their engineers and environmental inspectors to a certified stormwater management training, and ITD has agreed to implement new construction management practices to help avoid future violations of the stormwater regulations. “Runoff from construction sites is a major contributor to water-quality impairment in the US,” observes Granta Y. Nakayama, EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance. “The EPA is aggressively enforcing federal regulations to help control this problem.” In a related settlement, the contractor agreed to pay half a million dollars to a local homeowners’ association to settle claims for property damage allegedly caused by sediment discharges from the construction site.
Travel down to the other end of our country, where the City of Dallas, TX, reached an agreement with the federal government requiring the city to spend more than $3.5 million in a comprehensive effort to decrease the amount of pollution entering the city’s stormwater system. That agreement was reported on May 10, 2006, by the Department of Justice and the EPA. The settlement requires the city to build two wetlands at an estimated cost of $1.2 million. One of the wetlands will be along the Trinity River and the other along Cedar Creek near the Dallas Zoo. There was also a civil penalty of $800,000. Allegations were first made two years ago that the city had failed to implement, adequately fund, and adequately staff its stormwater management system. Under the agreement announced in May, the city is required to fill staff positions, inspect hundreds of industrial facilities and construction sites, and improve the management systems at several facilities. “This settlement benefits everyone in Dallas, by helping keep the city’s rivers, lakes, and streams clean,” explains Richard Greene, regional administrator of EPA’s Region 6. The Dallas settlement requires that at least 36 people work in the city’s stormwater management system (a 25% increase) and that the city inspect at least 500 stormwater discharge pipes per year, 500 industrial facilities per year, and large construction sites every two weeks. If you compare the size of Dallas with your community, you may be able to estimate an acceptable management system for your own needs.
Cooperation Within Communities Breeds Success
Not all harmful discharges are deliberate, nor are they caused only by businesses. One strong rein on the public’s compliance seems to be not that they think problems don’t exist but the innate belief that “somebody else” will handle the problems. There has been a suggestion gaining popularity nationally that a small tax be levied on the products that cause many of the problems (a good percentage of them everyday consumer products in the genres of personal care and preferred lifestyle) so that the cost of improving our water is borne by everybody, not just a few. The money garnered would form a national fund. It’s not so preposterous. Highways and other construction have been funded by similar taxes. This is not a battle between authority and authority, nor should it be. Many cities have made conscientious and efficient efforts to meet the mandates of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Phase II. They do not see it as a challenge to see who can keep the hounds of EPA at bay. They see the regulations as ways to benefit their communities, ways that have been ignored in the past. A good example is Minneapolis. Two years ago, the City of Minneapolis passed the “Rainleader Ordinance,” which requires the disconnection of all roof and area drains, or other stormwater or clearwater connections to the city’s sanitary sewer system, by 2007. Included in the projects for Minneapolis are not only sewer separation and sanitary main restoration projects, but also the use of hydraulic modeling to identify improvements in the sanitary sewer system that could make the best of storage capacity. Problem areas are being located and there is continuing research to find inlets and cross-connections to storm drains so that they may be eliminated through maintenance repairs. “Concerning illicit discharges, we usually think of two types,” notes Tom Frame, P.E., supervisor of the city’s environmental service program. “There are those facilities that are physically dumping illicit discharges and there are faulty systems that are to blame. The first category is usually irregular dumping, but we can find problems more easily in the second type, because the flows from faulty systems in, say, residences are continuous and it is easier to locate the problems.”
 |
Photo: CDS Technologies |
| Community education includes telling us all just how much debris is tossed away that may harm the water. |
Somebody once described the US as a “very large collection of small communities,” and that is still true today. While most of the news seems to concern large municipalities, there are thousands of smaller communities, with populations comprising fewer than 10,000 people, who have many of the same problems. Ohio, for example, has more than 260 small municipalities. Jason Fyffe works at the central office for stormwater of the Ohio EPA. In his work with those smaller communities, one of his responsibilities has been the successful writing of the permit for small municipal programs. “One move that many of them have made is the development of a stormwater utility,” observes Fyffe. “The charge for a residential property owner may be $2 to $3 per month, and credit is given if that owner does something good for the stormwater management of the community. That encourages good practices. For industrial customers, whose contributions are higher than residential customers’, credit can be given for having retention ponds or similar proactive facilities.” The charges are assessed according to the size of the property and its impervious surface. That could be 2,000 square feet, say, for a residence.
Fyffe agrees with others we spoke with that it is easier to find regular illicit discharges (such as from faulty systems in established properties) than those irregular discharges that are usually termed dumping. “We are proud of the fact that, in Ohio, especially in our smaller communities, we work with local soil and water experts, and with agencies like county and city health departments,” adds Fyffe. “This cooperation seems to be an excellent method to educate our public in the friendliest and locally practical way.” In the not-too-distant future, Fyffe’s department will start auditing the small communities in Ohio, and, here again, it will be a case of sitting down with local people in as helpful and friendly a routine as possible.
 |
Photo: Envirosight |
| Small, competent cameras travel through pipe to find problems. |
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, many communities are small, with hundreds—rather thousands—of inhabitants. It used to be a mining area in which the mining companies owned just about everything; when they departed, they left a legacy of bad sanitation and water infrastructure. For these small communities, many with low-income levels, compliance is difficult. “They are doing what they can to comply,” says Kristen Mariuzza, P.E., an engineer with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “They are waiting for funding. We have formal or informal agreements with them to upgrade systems as they are able, and that has been working well. We are asking them to stay in the game and try not to bully them with too many specific dates.”
A few of the communities may not appreciate the merits of upgrading their systems, but most people realize the value of good sanitation and water habits. “One of the problems we do have here is the amount of snow we receive,” adds Mariuzza. “It’s like a dry-weather problem because it is possible that all the snow will melt in a seven-day period. That’s like a 100-year flood event! There’s a lot of water in that snow, and, if it thaws quickly, it’s like throwing 13 inches of rain down the drain in a week.” The foundation drains were possibly the worst part of the water and sanitation systems that the mines abandoned. Mariuzza’s department seems to have been successful in developing a good, cooperative spirit between authority and residents, and that is a pattern that is making compliance with NPDES Phase II increasingly successful nationwide.
Finding the Right Remedies
Accurate inspections are essential to success, and the tools to find leaks and unwanted flows are available. What they save may be worth much more than their initial cost and certainly worth more than fines imposed on the community. “Illicit flows can be detected through flow monitoring, but the only way to confirm their source is through visual inspection,” advises Richard Lindner, president of Envirosight, a company that specializes in visual inspection equipment, from crawlers to portable zoom cameras. “The Envirosight ROVVER and SuperVision video inspection crawlers drive remotely through underground pipes, capturing live video using a robotic head. They can find, measure distance to, and document illegal pipe taps. They can identify suspicious debris and corrosion, and they will locate other sources of inflow and infiltration.” Municipalities, departments of transportation, contractors, and engineering companies have used Envirosight equipment successfully.  |
Photo: Ratech |
| Once training has been given, its simple to operate the Ratech system. |
“We inspect our pipe on a regular basis, and we have used CCTV [closed-circuit television] video pipeline inspection systems from Ratech Electronics,” says Perry McClean, whose role is with the City of Calgary, AB, Canada. “As far as we know we do not have an epidemic of illicit discharges, but we are confident that our regular inspections will find them if they should occur. The system we use is compact and the monitors are excellent, with a very clear picture of what is down there. We locate cross-connections and can see clearly if there are problems there.” Ratech pipe inspection cameras work for pipe sizes ranging from 2 to 40 inches. “Some units are portable,” notes Frank D’Andrea of Ratech. “You can push those through the sewer drain line. Then we have the larger, truck-mounted inspection cameras that incorporate a six-wheel drive crawler with our Pan ’n’ Tilt rotating camera. The crawler is remotely controlled within the studio of the mainline inspection truck, and a live video is recorded.” Among problems detected by Ratech customers have been collapsed or broken pipe, roots penetrating a pipe wall and blocking flow, corroded pipe, offset joints, lateral pipe disconnects, and blocked pipe.
Some communities that have enjoyed success will assert that it’s the attitude and education of the people involved rather than specific products or equipment that can bring success. “It may be difficult at first, but once contractors see there is an easy way to do the job and a difficult way, they choose the easy way,” explains Derek Huff at the Drain Commissioner’s Office of Livingston County, MI. “The easy way is to comply with regulations, and the state can impose serious fines if you don’t. They control the sediment from leaving a job site, with silt fences or socks or something like that, and they report to us how conditions change after a rain event.” Mr. Huff guesses that the number of regulation breakers in his county is probably only 1% or 2% at the most. To stay in business, contractors must do their business right. It’s not difficult, and most contractors are successful.
 |
Photo: CDS Technologies |
| Good systems collect the discarded debris in surprising quantities. |
Dangerous Dry Spells
When we are trying to educate the public, we remind them that a significant percentage of the rubbish that tries to escape down the stormwater drains or even straight down to the river is generated when there are no heavy rains or raging floods. Dry weather may be the worst time for debris to collect: pop cans, newspapers, plastic bags, fast food containers, water bottles, and all the other objects that are tossed away. In dry spells, the debris sits and accumulates, waiting for the high-powered washing down of the rainfall. “The rain will wash it all away,” comment the wise ones, as black clouds approach. In a particularly hot dry spell, we hear rejoicing that there is some rain forecast. “It will settle the dust” has been a regular comment. The rain doesn’t just settle the dust from the dry spell; it collects it and pushes it … down the drain, or to the river, or to the ocean. The trouble is that dust isn’t just harmless soil. It’s often mixed with chemicals (and oil, grease, metals, and solvents). Good conduct in dry weather is a lesson we should certainly be teaching our constituents. “Don’t litter” is good advice, not just for the looks of Main Street and Jefferson Park but also for the recipe of our future water. Construction job sites have come increasingly under scrutiny, whatever the weather. New York City has a “no track-out policy” for vehicles that visit and work on city job sites. You can’t take the debris you collect on the wheels and tires out into the street. To solve such problems, a company called Wheelwash has developed the Rhino Multi, a self-contained, onsite wheel cleaning system. “We provide customers with a fast, efficient, and environmentally safe way to contain job-site track-out,” explains Ben Taylor, manager at Kiely Equipment who represents Wheelwash in five big eastern states. “By controlling the amount of dirt that leaves a job site, we help contractors avoid some hefty penalties.” An environmental engineering firm has been using the unit at a site where there are 60 trucks per day moving in and out of the site. The average time needed to clean a truck’s wheels and tires in this environmentally sensible way is about 30 seconds, and 92% of the water used is recycled.
Among the worst-hit sites that suffer from dry-weather flows are our beaches. How often they must be closed for health reasons! More than 50% of our population lives in coastal counties, and the numbers are increasing. One of the states most affected is California. I asked Rick Wilson, who represents Surfrider Foundation and has written about the use of dry-weather storm drain diversions in California, if there had been progress in California. “We’ve been trying to collect data on the possible reduction in dry-weather flows due to environmental education outreach efforts by municipalities and environmental groups like Surfrider Foundation,” observes Wilson. “There seems to be little data out there. There has been an analysis of data by Orange County Sanitation District to see whether diversions in the Huntington Beach/Newport Beach area have resulted in fewer health advisories at Huntington Beach. I believe that, although they did not see a reduction in ‘beach mile days’ of postings, they did see a reduction in the average bacteria concentration in the collected samples.” At the City of Dana Point, CA, an ozone treatment system for Salt Creek was installed, and there have been no dry-weather postings at adjacent beaches since the system became operational last fall. Coastal counties seem to be an important sector affected by dry-weather flows and we hope to bring more specific and encouraging news about this at a later date.
 |
Photo: John Francis |
| Trash collects, waiting to be washed away. |
Solutions Are Available
The City of Dearborn, MI, revised its plan for a combined sewer overflow control project, and the local newspaper, the Dearborn Times-Herald, lauded the decision because it would save the city $120 million over the original cost estimates. The new plan employs a compact vertical treatment shaft process using the CDS Technologies Raked Bar Screen fine screening system. “During dry-weather conditions, when the interceptor sewer is below capacity, all flows are below the upstream feed pipe weir of the vertical treatment shaft and they go by gravity to the interceptor,” explains Bob Glod of CDS Technologies. “In wet-weather conditions, when the interceptor exceeds capacity, flow rises over the upstream feed pipe weir and begins to fall into the treatment shaft. Chlorine is injected automatically prior to the upstream weir, via chemical mixers.” As the storm event continues, the shaft fills. Floatables are trapped on the upstream side of the shaft’s baffle wall and solids settle in the shaft. As the shaft becomes full, the Raked Bar Screen activates and continually operates to trap screenings of mostly neutral buoyant materials in the wastestream. The treated water flows into the river. As the storm event weakens and goes away, dewatering pumps are activated and the water is drawn down to about the 10-foot level. At that stage a flushing mode begins, with the settleables kept in suspension. Dewatering chopper pumps continue until the shaft is emptied. Odors in the shaft are then neutralized. “This system eliminates pumping stations, eliminates costly traditional tunnel shaft structures, and requires no surge control tanks and screening buildings,” adds Glod.
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Photo: ParkSer West |
| This Parker West Mobile System connects to wastewater processors. |
“We help our customers comply with federal, state, and local legislation,” says Cathleen Park, owner of Parker West with its Parker West Mobile Systems, which has spent time and money researching, developing, and producing equipment that will help solve many problems of discharge from sites like parking lots. Speaking of this enterprise, a major oil company said, “They are our only approved vendor for environmental cleaning and wastewater recycling for our service stations. The company is legally permitted in the cities and counties where we own locations, which streamlines our operations and confirms we are in compliance. Their cleaning services are very effective and their prices are more than fair.” What are those prices? Potential customers ask how much more it must cost to use an environmental pressure washer. “A pricing survey for our industry indicates that conventional pressure washers, which do not contain, collect, and process their wastewater, charge $0.05 to $0.25 per square foot,” explains Parker. “We charge $0.06 to $0.15 a square foot.” The key difference seems to be that Parker West is a service provider who is in compliance. The company has successful experience at a broad range of sites, including auto repair, oil change shops, gas stations, truck stops, military bases, airports, and multilevel parking structures, as well as open parking lots, construction sites, transit stations, manufacturing facilities, commercial kitchens, ports and marinas, aircraft carriers, and emergency spill cleanup sites. That’s a good list of places where (especially in dry weather) the dangerous substances can accumulate through the normal, daily operation of business. The mobile wastewater processing from Parker West offers automatic containment and collection, with no storm drain runoff. The system can do 500 to 1,000 gallons per hour. It removes and permanently fixates grease, oil, paints, metals, and non-hazardous solids.
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Photo: Ratech |
| Finding the problems in pipe is so much easier than it used to be. |
Advertisement
What if you could hover above your community and get a perfect picture of what is happening with drains and streams and discharges? You can do that. Thermal MapIR is a service of Stockton Infrared Thermographic Services Inc., in North Carolina. “We produce high-quality, digital thermal, and photographic ortho-rectified maps that can be added as layers to your existing CAD and GIS map systems,” explains Greg Stockton, head of Stockton Infrared. “We fly over a selected area with an infrared camera mounted so that it looks straight down to the ground. We store the digital IR imagery on a computer hard drive and later copy it to a convenient deliverable, such as a DVD.”
If hot, dry weather is the culprit for building up large amounts of harmful substances on parking lots and other impervious surfaces, cold weather can be an excellent time for detecting leaks. It’s a good time for identifying (by their thermal infrared signatures) stormwater drain discharges, leaking sewage collector lines, water mains, and taps into stormwater drainage lines. As those sources of pollution seep or leak into streams, rivers, creeks, and lakes, their thermal signatures vary from their surroundings because the liquid from under the ground is relatively warm flowing across the ground and down a bank into a stream. A warm plume of liquid flowing downstream with a body of water it has joined is detectable due to the difference in temperatures of the two liquids. Detection by aerial photography such as Stockton’s planes (he has 10 of them) do is recommended for those days in late fall, winter, and early spring; a lack of leaf cover between camera and target also helps remove interference at those times of the year. We saw a photo where a leak from a building that took its flow down to a creek was shown clearly. If you had not seen the photo, you might never have detected the leak. Aerial thermal mapping is not something to do every week! Every few years may be a good way to start. There are relatively few qualified companies to do such work, but you can find them, and they know what they’re doing.
Author's Bio: Paul Hull writes on construction topics for several magazines.
November-December 2006
Community Compliance
There’s more to illicit discharge detection than just finding the culprits.
“They do it at night or on the weekends” was a statement we heard often when we were asking about the people knowingly responsible for illicit discharges. “That’s when they think there are no inspectors around.” We have been told frequently that education is the answer to the problem of illicit discharges, and that implies education of the general public. It means telling them, for example, that a quart of used motor oil can pollute as much as a quarter of a million gallons of good water. Does anybody get caught? Is it a losing battle for those of us committed to clean water and healthy communities? Yes and no. We chose two cases where violations have been found and the violators consented to pay. The first concerns the Idaho Transportation Department (ITD) and contractor Scarsella Brothers Inc. There were violations of the Clean Water Act during the construction of the Bellgrove-Mica realignment of Highway 95. The amount that was agreed on for payment was $895,000, reported the Justice Department and the USEPA on May 3, 2006. The settlement concluded a lawsuit (begun in 2004) alleging that Scarsella Brothers and ITD failed to provide adequate stormwater controls for a large highway project that later deposited tons of sediment in Mica Creek. The creek flows into Mica Bay in Lake Coeur d’Alene. Apart from the financial penalties, ITD and Scarsella Brothers agreed to send their engineers and environmental inspectors to a certified stormwater management training, and ITD has agreed to implement new construction management practices to help avoid future violations of the stormwater regulations. “Runoff from construction sites is a major contributor to water-quality impairment in the US,” observes Granta Y. Nakayama, EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance. “The EPA is aggressively enforcing federal regulations to help control this problem.” In a related settlement, the contractor agreed to pay half a million dollars to a local homeowners’ association to settle claims for property damage allegedly caused by sediment discharges from the construction site.
Travel down to the other end of our country, where the City of Dallas, TX, reached an agreement with the federal government requiring the city to spend more than $3.5 million in a comprehensive effort to decrease the amount of pollution entering the city’s stormwater system. That agreement was reported on May 10, 2006, by the Department of Justice and the EPA. The settlement requires the city to build two wetlands at an estimated cost of $1.2 million. One of the wetlands will be along the Trinity River and the other along Cedar Creek near the Dallas Zoo. There was also a civil penalty of $800,000. Allegations were first made two years ago that the city had failed to implement, adequately fund, and adequately staff its stormwater management system. Under the agreement announced in May, the city is required to fill staff positions, inspect hundreds of industrial facilities and construction sites, and improve the management systems at several facilities. “This settlement benefits everyone in Dallas, by helping keep the city’s rivers, lakes, and streams clean,” explains Richard Greene, regional administrator of EPA’s Region 6. The Dallas settlement requires that at least 36 people work in the city’s stormwater management system (a 25% increase) and that the city inspect at least 500 stormwater discharge pipes per year, 500 industrial facilities per year, and large construction sites every two weeks. If you compare the size of Dallas with your community, you may be able to estimate an acceptable management system for your own needs.
Cooperation Within Communities Breeds Success
Not all harmful discharges are deliberate, nor are they caused only by businesses. One strong rein on the public’s compliance seems to be not that they think problems don’t exist but the innate belief that “somebody else” will handle the problems. There has been a suggestion gaining popularity nationally that a small tax be levied on the products that cause many of the problems (a good percentage of them everyday consumer products in the genres of personal care and preferred lifestyle) so that the cost of improving our water is borne by everybody, not just a few. The money garnered would form a national fund. It’s not so preposterous. Highways and other construction have been funded by similar taxes. This is not a battle between authority and authority, nor should it be. Many cities have made conscientious and efficient efforts to meet the mandates of National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) Phase II. They do not see it as a challenge to see who can keep the hounds of EPA at bay. They see the regulations as ways to benefit their communities, ways that have been ignored in the past. A good example is Minneapolis. Two years ago, the City of Minneapolis passed the “Rainleader Ordinance,” which requires the disconnection of all roof and area drains, or other stormwater or clearwater connections to the city’s sanitary sewer system, by 2007. Included in the projects for Minneapolis are not only sewer separation and sanitary main restoration projects, but also the use of hydraulic modeling to identify improvements in the sanitary sewer system that could make the best of storage capacity. Problem areas are being located and there is continuing research to find inlets and cross-connections to storm drains so that they may be eliminated through maintenance repairs. “Concerning illicit discharges, we usually think of two types,” notes Tom Frame, P.E., supervisor of the city’s environmental service program. “There are those facilities that are physically dumping illicit discharges and there are faulty systems that are to blame. The first category is usually irregular dumping, but we can find problems more easily in the second type, because the flows from faulty systems in, say, residences are continuous and it is easier to locate the problems.”
|
Photo: CDS Technologies |
| Community education includes telling us all just how much debris is tossed away that may harm the water. |
Somebody once described the US as a “very large collection of small communities,” and that is still true today. While most of the news seems to concern large municipalities, there are thousands of smaller communities, with populations comprising fewer than 10,000 people, who have many of the same problems. Ohio, for example, has more than 260 small municipalities. Jason Fyffe works at the central office for stormwater of the Ohio EPA. In his work with those smaller communities, one of his responsibilities has been the successful writing of the permit for small municipal programs. “One move that many of them have made is the development of a stormwater utility,” observes Fyffe. “The charge for a residential property owner may be $2 to $3 per month, and credit is given if that owner does something good for the stormwater management of the community. That encourages good practices. For industrial customers, whose contributions are higher than residential customers’, credit can be given for having retention ponds or similar proactive facilities.” The charges are assessed according to the size of the property and its impervious surface. That could be 2,000 square feet, say, for a residence.
Fyffe agrees with others we spoke with that it is easier to find regular illicit discharges (such as from faulty systems in established properties) than those irregular discharges that are usually termed dumping. “We are proud of the fact that, in Ohio, especially in our smaller communities, we work with local soil and water experts, and with agencies like county and city health departments,” adds Fyffe. “This cooperation seems to be an excellent method to educate our public in the friendliest and locally practical way.” In the not-too-distant future, Fyffe’s department will start auditing the small communities in Ohio, and, here again, it will be a case of sitting down with local people in as helpful and friendly a routine as possible.
|
Photo: Envirosight |
| Small, competent cameras travel through pipe to find problems. |
In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, many communities are small, with hundreds—rather thousands—of inhabitants. It used to be a mining area in which the mining companies owned just about everything; when they departed, they left a legacy of bad sanitation and water infrastructure. For these small communities, many with low-income levels, compliance is difficult. “They are doing what they can to comply,” says Kristen Mariuzza, P.E., an engineer with the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality. “They are waiting for funding. We have formal or informal agreements with them to upgrade systems as they are able, and that has been working well. We are asking them to stay in the game and try not to bully them with too many specific dates.”
A few of the communities may not appreciate the merits of upgrading their systems, but most people realize the value of good sanitation and water habits. “One of the problems we do have here is the amount of snow we receive,” adds Mariuzza. “It’s like a dry-weather problem because it is possible that all the snow will melt in a seven-day period. That’s like a 100-year flood event! There’s a lot of water in that snow, and, if it thaws quickly, it’s like throwing 13 inches of rain down the drain in a week.” The foundation drains were possibly the worst part of the water and sanitation systems that the mines abandoned. Mariuzza’s department seems to have been successful in developing a good, cooperative spirit between authority and residents, and that is a pattern that is making compliance with NPDES Phase II increasingly successful nationwide.
Finding the Right Remedies
Accurate inspections are essential to success, and the tools to find leaks and unwanted flows are available. What they save may be worth much more than their initial cost and certainly worth more than fines imposed on the community. “Illicit flows can be detected through flow monitoring, but the only way to confirm their source is through visual inspection,” advises Richard Lindner, president of Envirosight, a company that specializes in visual inspection equipment, from crawlers to portable zoom cameras. “The Envirosight ROVVER and SuperVision video inspection crawlers drive remotely through underground pipes, capturing live video using a robotic head. They can find, measure distance to, and document illegal pipe taps. They can identify suspicious debris and corrosion, and they will locate other sources of inflow and infiltration.” Municipalities, departments of transportation, contractors, and engineering companies have used Envirosight equipment successfully. |
Photo: Ratech |
| Once training has been given, its simple to operate the Ratech system. |
“We inspect our pipe on a regular basis, and we have used CCTV [closed-circuit television] video pipeline inspection systems from Ratech Electronics,” says Perry McClean, whose role is with the City of Calgary, AB, Canada. “As far as we know we do not have an epidemic of illicit discharges, but we are confident that our regular inspections will find them if they should occur. The system we use is compact and the monitors are excellent, with a very clear picture of what is down there. We locate cross-connections and can see clearly if there are problems there.” Ratech pipe inspection cameras work for pipe sizes ranging from 2 to 40 inches. “Some units are portable,” notes Frank D’Andrea of Ratech. “You can push those through the sewer drain line. Then we have the larger, truck-mounted inspection cameras that incorporate a six-wheel drive crawler with our Pan ’n’ Tilt rotating camera. The crawler is remotely controlled within the studio of the mainline inspection truck, and a live video is recorded.” Among problems detected by Ratech customers have been collapsed or broken pipe, roots penetrating a pipe wall and blocking flow, corroded pipe, offset joints, lateral pipe disconnects, and blocked pipe.
Some communities that have enjoyed success will assert that it’s the attitude and education of the people involved rather than specific products or equipment that can bring success. “It may be difficult at first, but once contractors see there is an easy way to do the job and a difficult way, they choose the easy way,” explains Derek Huff at the Drain Commissioner’s Office of Livingston County, MI. “The easy way is to comply with regulations, and the state can impose serious fines if you don’t. They control the sediment from leaving a job site, with silt fences or socks or something like that, and they report to us how conditions change after a rain event.” Mr. Huff guesses that the number of regulation breakers in his county is probably only 1% or 2% at the most. To stay in business, contractors must do their business right. It’s not difficult, and most contractors are successful.
|
Photo: CDS Technologies |
| Good systems collect the discarded debris in surprising quantities. |
Dangerous Dry Spells
When we are trying to educate the public, we remind them that a significant percentage of the rubbish that tries to escape down the stormwater drains or even straight down to the river is generated when there are no heavy rains or raging floods. Dry weather may be the worst time for debris to collect: pop cans, newspapers, plastic bags, fast food containers, water bottles, and all the other objects that are tossed away. In dry spells, the debris sits and accumulates, waiting for the high-powered washing down of the rainfall. “The rain will wash it all away,” comment the wise ones, as black clouds approach. In a particularly hot dry spell, we hear rejoicing that there is some rain forecast. “It will settle the dust” has been a regular comment. The rain doesn’t just settle the dust from the dry spell; it collects it and pushes it … down the drain, or to the river, or to the ocean. The trouble is that dust isn’t just harmless soil. It’s often mixed with chemicals (and oil, grease, metals, and solvents). Good conduct in dry weather is a lesson we should certainly be teaching our constituents. “Don’t litter” is good advice, not just for the looks of Main Street and Jefferson Park but also for the recipe of our future water. Construction job sites have come increasingly under scrutiny, whatever the weather. New York City has a “no track-out policy” for vehicles that visit and work on city job sites. You can’t take the debris you collect on the wheels and tires out into the street. To solve such problems, a company called Wheelwash has developed the Rhino Multi, a self-contained, onsite wheel cleaning system. “We provide customers with a fast, efficient, and environmentally safe way to contain job-site track-out,” explains Ben Taylor, manager at Kiely Equipment who represents Wheelwash in five big eastern states. “By controlling the amount of dirt that leaves a job site, we help contractors avoid some hefty penalties.” An environmental engineering firm has been using the unit at a site where there are 60 trucks per day moving in and out of the site. The average time needed to clean a truck’s wheels and tires in this environmentally sensible way is about 30 seconds, and 92% of the water used is recycled.
Among the worst-hit sites that suffer from dry-weather flows are our beaches. How often they must be closed for health reasons! More than 50% of our population lives in coastal counties, and the numbers are increasing. One of the states most affected is California. I asked Rick Wilson, who represents Surfrider Foundation and has written about the use of dry-weather storm drain diversions in California, if there had been progress in California. “We’ve been trying to collect data on the possible reduction in dry-weather flows due to environmental education outreach efforts by municipalities and environmental groups like Surfrider Foundation,” observes Wilson. “There seems to be little data out there. There has been an analysis of data by Orange County Sanitation District to see whether diversions in the Huntington Beach/Newport Beach area have resulted in fewer health advisories at Huntington Beach. I believe that, although they did not see a reduction in ‘beach mile days’ of postings, they did see a reduction in the average bacteria concentration in the collected samples.” At the City of Dana Point, CA, an ozone treatment system for Salt Creek was installed, and there have been no dry-weather postings at adjacent beaches since the system became operational last fall. Coastal counties seem to be an important sector affected by dry-weather flows and we hope to bring more specific and encouraging news about this at a later date.
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Photo: John Francis |
| Trash collects, waiting to be washed away. |
Solutions Are Available
The City of Dearborn, MI, revised its plan for a combined sewer overflow control project, and the local newspaper, the Dearborn Times-Herald, lauded the decision because it would save the city $120 million over the original cost estimates. The new plan employs a compact vertical treatment shaft process using the CDS Technologies Raked Bar Screen fine screening system. “During dry-weather conditions, when the interceptor sewer is below capacity, all flows are below the upstream feed pipe weir of the vertical treatment shaft and they go by gravity to the interceptor,” explains Bob Glod of CDS Technologies. “In wet-weather conditions, when the interceptor exceeds capacity, flow rises over the upstream feed pipe weir and begins to fall into the treatment shaft. Chlorine is injected automatically prior to the upstream weir, via chemical mixers.” As the storm event continues, the shaft fills. Floatables are trapped on the upstream side of the shaft’s baffle wall and solids settle in the shaft. As the shaft becomes full, the Raked Bar Screen activates and continually operates to trap screenings of mostly neutral buoyant materials in the wastestream. The treated water flows into the river. As the storm event weakens and goes away, dewatering pumps are activated and the water is drawn down to about the 10-foot level. At that stage a flushing mode begins, with the settleables kept in suspension. Dewatering chopper pumps continue until the shaft is emptied. Odors in the shaft are then neutralized. “This system eliminates pumping stations, eliminates costly traditional tunnel shaft structures, and requires no surge control tanks and screening buildings,” adds Glod.
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Photo: ParkSer West |
| This Parker West Mobile System connects to wastewater processors. |
“We help our customers comply with federal, state, and local legislation,” says Cathleen Park, owner of Parker West with its Parker West Mobile Systems, which has spent time and money researching, developing, and producing equipment that will help solve many problems of discharge from sites like parking lots. Speaking of this enterprise, a major oil company said, “They are our only approved vendor for environmental cleaning and wastewater recycling for our service stations. The company is legally permitted in the cities and counties where we own locations, which streamlines our operations and confirms we are in compliance. Their cleaning services are very effective and their prices are more than fair.” What are those prices? Potential customers ask how much more it must cost to use an environmental pressure washer. “A pricing survey for our industry indicates that conventional pressure washers, which do not contain, collect, and process their wastewater, charge $0.05 to $0.25 per square foot,” explains Parker. “We charge $0.06 to $0.15 a square foot.” The key difference seems to be that Parker West is a service provider who is in compliance. The company has successful experience at a broad range of sites, including auto repair, oil change shops, gas stations, truck stops, military bases, airports, and multilevel parking structures, as well as open parking lots, construction sites, transit stations, manufacturing facilities, commercial kitchens, ports and marinas, aircraft carriers, and emergency spill cleanup sites. That’s a good list of places where (especially in dry weather) the dangerous substances can accumulate through the normal, daily operation of business. The mobile wastewater processing from Parker West offers automatic containment and collection, with no storm drain runoff. The system can do 500 to 1,000 gallons per hour. It removes and permanently fixates grease, oil, paints, metals, and non-hazardous solids.
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Photo: Ratech |
| Finding the problems in pipe is so much easier than it used to be. |
What if you could hover above your community and get a perfect picture of what is happening with drains and streams and discharges? You can do that. Thermal MapIR is a service of Stockton Infrared Thermographic Services Inc., in North Carolina. “We produce high-quality, digital thermal, and photographic ortho-rectified maps that can be added as layers to your existing CAD and GIS map systems,” explains Greg Stockton, head of Stockton Infrared. “We fly over a selected area with an infrared camera mounted so that it looks straight down to the ground. We store the digital IR imagery on a computer hard drive and later copy it to a convenient deliverable, such as a DVD.”
If hot, dry weather is the culprit for building up large amounts of harmful substances on parking lots and other impervious surfaces, cold weather can be an excellent time for detecting leaks. It’s a good time for identifying (by their thermal infrared signatures) stormwater drain discharges, leaking sewage collector lines, water mains, and taps into stormwater drainage lines. As those sources of pollution seep or leak into streams, rivers, creeks, and lakes, their thermal signatures vary from their surroundings because the liquid from under the ground is relatively warm flowing across the ground and down a bank into a stream. A warm plume of liquid flowing downstream with a body of water it has joined is detectable due to the difference in temperatures of the two liquids. Detection by aerial photography such as Stockton’s planes (he has 10 of them) do is recommended for those days in late fall, winter, and early spring; a lack of leaf cover between camera and target also helps remove interference at those times of the year. We saw a photo where a leak from a building that took its flow down to a creek was shown clearly. If you had not seen the photo, you might never have detected the leak. Aerial thermal mapping is not something to do every week! Every few years may be a good way to start. There are relatively few qualified companies to do such work, but you can find them, and they know what they’re doing.