AZ Utility Breaks New Ground In Water Reuse With Help From VTScada Software

By Christopher Little

The Fountain Hills Sanitary District (FHSD) provides wastewater treatment for over 13,000 homes and businesses. In addition to supplying the town’s namesake fountain, its treated water irrigates local golf courses and parks. In 2000, the utility developed an innovative way to make up the short-fall during the dryer less populated summer. The process, known as aquifer storage and recovery (ASR), involves injecting excess treated water into the aquifer and recovering it when summer demand increases. ASR had never been used at such an extreme depth.

It also developed a new supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) application using VTScada software to monitor and control its entire operation. This application helps operators adhere to strict State regulations by tracking how much water it injects and reclaims from the aquifer at any given moment. In this article, members of the Fountain Hills team discuss how they built flexibility into the SCADA system to help them to overcome the challenges of this new technology.