A Municipal SCADA Project Comes In On Time, Under Budget And Exceeds Expectations

By John Grey, Devin Carroll and Christopher Little

In June of 2009, the Town of Selma, North Carolina commissioned a supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor and control their lift stations, tanks, wells and water treatment plant. This project was made possible in part, by stimulus funding provided by Construction Grants & Loans, a state-level wastewater agency. Despite strict regulations and extensive paperwork, the project came in on-time and under-budget while still managing to surpass the customer’s expectations by allowing them to identify hidden issues and optimize the efficiency of their system. In this article, project manager John Grey and system integrator Devin Carroll discuss the factors that made the project a success.

Serving 7000 residents, the Town of Selma's Water and Sewer Division is responsible for administering four elevated water tanks, nineteen wastewater lift stations, eight water wells and one water treatment plant.

Carroll gives credit to the technical support he received from Trihedral. “Their support is phenomenal. It was great to be able to just call and get a person. There were not a lot of hoops to jump through. They have a front line of support people but they can also pull in their engineers when they need the answer to a specific question. That helped to push us towards using VTScada.”