On the banks of Puget Sound and in the shadow of Mount Rainier exists Tacoma, Washington. The city is home to approximately 211,000 residents, making it the third largest in the state of Washington. Tacoma’s vision is one focused on stewardship and resiliency, as outlined the Environmental Services Department strategic plan: “We believe everything we do supports healthy neighborhoods and a thriving Puget Sound, leaving a better Tacoma for all.”
Too many dog owners think their pets’ waste easily breaks down in nature and is helpful to plants, so they leave it on the ground. The truth is that dog poo and other pet waste is loaded with germs such as e. coli and giardia that make people sick as well as nutrients that can fuel problematic algae blooms.
Wastewater service charges vary considerably across EPA regions and States. That’s one of the key findings from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies’ (NACWA) Cost of Clean Water Index. If you live in Montana, Wyoming or the Dakotas (EPA Region 8), your average service charge of $261 a year is considerably less than the $884 your fellow Americans up in New England (EPA Region 1) are paying. As you can imagine, much of the difference is to do with population size and geography.
Salvator Mundi sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Walter Isaacson’s latest biography is a breakaway hit. Management guru Michael Gelb’s book accessing the thought techniques of history’s most accomplished Renaissance Man — in every literal and figurative sense of the word — is still a bestseller. Almost 500 years after his death, Leonardo da Vinci is still a superstar.
Lani Good, P.E., is an Asset Management Practice Leader. During her 5 years at West Yost Associates, she has specialized in Utility Asset Management. Her organization exclusively focuses on water, wastewater, and stormwater systems to ensure longevity for typical water infrastructure assets – pipes, pumps, storage and treatment plants.
Headlines in 2018 were dominated by the red tide along Florida’s Gulf Coast, which persisted for months, causing human respiratory illnesses, the deaths of dozens of Florida’s beloved dolphins and manatees, and hundreds of millions of dollars in lost tourism revenue and cleanup costs. Here are insights on how to forestall becoming the next city to make national headlines related to harmful algal blooms.
One of the great turnaround stories in the history of our nation’s water bodies is that of the Chesapeake Bay. Since 1976 when the Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA) first undertook a comprehensive study of the Bay, efforts to address excessive nitrogen and phosphorous degradation of water quality have steadily improved the Bay’s complex ecosystem.
District Sales Engineer Andy Singer has spent enough time troubleshooting problems in the field that not much surprises him anymore. When it comes to dry barrel fire hydrants, though, he still gets a chuckle out of some of his more outrageous experiences. Here is his educational and entertaining take on the care and maintenance of fire hydrants, and ways to maximize a utility’s return on what potentially can be a 50+-year infrastructure investment.
For most of the United States, we’ve reached the time of year where Americans desire to maintain a perfectly green lawn starts to be tested by the warmer and dryer summer months. From the water industry’s perspective, it’s staggering just how many billions of gallons of treated water ends up being sprayed across our hallowed front and back yards in maintaining a full and aesthetically-pleasing lawn.
There are many options for ensuring accurate billing of water used at established industrial customer locations. But how do municipalities or businesses keep track of water availability and use for intermittent applications or movable access points? We spoke with McCrometer, Inc.’s Marc Bennett for insight into how water utilities and industries can efficiently track and allocate water use for billing or internal accounting purposes in such ad hoc applications.
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