A federal agency has released a long-awaited report suggesting that perfluorinated compounds (PFCs) are more dangerous to human health than federal standards currently take into account.
A new study found that groundwater overpumping can result in potentially dangerous water quality problems.
Scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey have published a major study of how pharmaceutical companies pollute the environment by sending their wastewater to treatment plants.
A new study has linked wastewater treatment plants to microplastic pollution in rivers in the United Kingdom.
The so-called brain-eating amoeba is back, once again creating challenges for water safety in Louisiana.
A man’s death sparked a water contamination scare in the Idaho town of Dietrich in late May.
The average 500-bed hospital in the United States loses $4 million each year directly due to inefficient communication, according to a study published in the Journal of Healthcare Management. Effective and efficient communication is essential to fulfilling a healthcare organization’s mission of providing high quality care. It is also crucial to eliminating unnecessary costs and maintaining an organization’s fiscal health.
Located at the mouth of the Big Cottonwood Canyon, the Big Cottonwood WTP is one of three water treatment facilities providing treated water to Salt Lake City (SLC), Utah. The utility distributes water through about 1,300 miles of transmission and distribution pipe to over 90,500 connections. Recently, the Big Cottonwood WTP was recognized for delivering 16 years of high quality water and received the Directors Award from the EPA & AWWA Partnership for Safe Water.
The mere mention of autonomous transportation still evokes images from sci-fi movies for some people. However, the reality is that this concept is not pie-in-the-sky talk — it’s really here. And it won’t be long before it’s mainstream. In fact, PwC’s 2017 Commercial Transportation Trends report revealed that 2016 was a breakout year for new technologies in the commercial transport industry, even while many companies still resisted them.
As part of its unique multiutility model—delivering water, wastewater, gas, and electricity services—Utilities Kingston provides safe and reliable gas services to nearly 15,000 customers in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. The company routinely inspects customer appliances and replaces gas meters.
As capacity requirements change and grow, it is essential to have agility when modeling system expansions and their potential impacts on current collections assets. How can wastewater management systems be modeled to address all current and future hydraulic capacity needs?
This blog is a summary of a presentation I gave at the Water Quality Association’s annual convention in Orlando.
It’s no secret that municipalities across the country are facing budget constraints.
The burden of the unavailability of replacement parts for the aging generators and the FBD basins' high maintenance motivated the Orlando Utilities Commission's Southwest Water Treatment Plant to update and upgrade the plant’s ozone system.
Population health is a primary concern of water utilities, whether water demands are typical (daily demands) or an out-of-the ordinary event occurs and threatens the continuous, safe supply of potable water. Water utilities must be prepared to respond to emergencies before they occur, and this is where hydraulic modeling can be particularly useful.
As a means of encouraging the growth of new technologies and improving operating costs, water and wastewater equipment manufacturers have long advocated for changing the mindset of equipment procurement from low-bid to lowest life-cycle cost evaluation.This have proven to be a very daunting task.
Almost 30 years ago, Calgon Carbon introduced one of the first advanced ultraviolet (UV) oxidation processes to remediate contaminated groundwater. Then soon after, Calgon Carbon became the first company to adapt the technology to cost-effectively inactivate pathogens in surface water. These breakthroughs have established Calgon Carbon as a world leader in the use of UV technology for disinfection and oxidation to treat drinking water, wastewater, groundwater, process water and ballast water.
For both disinfection and TOC-reduction applications, NeoTech Aqua Solutions’ patented ReFleX™ UV chamber technology represents the state-of-the-art in high-efficiency UV systems by reflecting over 99% of the UV we generate back into the water.
The NeoTech Aqua Disinfection Series is specially designed to disinfect water and is an essential component in advanced oxidation processes.
NeoTech Aqua Solutions’ Patriot Series utilizes D438 chamber technology in a stacked and manifolded configuration to support larger flow volumes. By integrating NeoTech Aqua’s patented ReFleX chamber technology, Patriot systems provide the most efficient and versatile UV water treatment equipment available for large volume users. Further, when configured as an n+1 design, the NeoTech Aqua’s Patriot systems meet most redundancy requirements.
NeoTech Aqua Solutions provides the most efficient and cost-effective UV systems for destroying Total Organic Carbons (TOC’s) in water. Whether your destroying NDMA, 1,4-dioxane, TCE, MTBE, urea, endocrine disruptors or other organics, only NeoTech Aqua provides ultraviolet TOC reduction with a treatment chamber optimized for low pressure mercury lamps. As a result, NeoTech Aqua’s UV systems achieve a three times greater TOC reduction per kilowatt compared to standard UV systems, reducing our clients’ costs and energy consumption. In addition to efficiently generating ample 185 nm UV for TOC reduction, NeoTech Aqua’s TOC reduction systems also generate significant levels of 254 nm UV which serve as a powerful disinfectant, providing you both TOC-free and organism-free product water.
The NeoTech CU4-X™ UV Water Treatment Control Interface is a remote and compact master controller capable of managing up to four NeoTech ultraviolet water treatment chambers independently and simultaneously.
By now, just about everyone in the U.S. has heard about Flint, Michigan’s water woes. Despite the many issues raised by that incident, urban water systems are not the sole reason the 2017 Report Card from the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the U.S. drinking water infrastructure an overall “D” grade. Hidden within that disheartening rating are the harsh realities faced by rural water systems.
It’s no secret that the U.S. EPA has changed course in the last year. But how have those changes affected local water and wastewater treatment operations? And how are those operations going to evolve along with the federal agency?
PFC contamination is the number one drinking water issue today. So how are local and federal leaders working to put an end to it?
Last year was full of twists and turns for the drinking water and wastewater treatment industries. What can 2017’s biggest stories tell us about what’s to come this year?
With water treatment plant operators around the country relying on paper and pen to record critical quality data, there is an opportunity to make life easier online.
In August 2014, the city of Toledo, Ohio informed its residents (~500,000 people) that they should not use tap water for any purposes including bathing and cooking. The culprit: microcystin, a toxin produced by blue-green algae, had been detected in the city’s finished drinking water at concentrations 2.5 times the World Health Organization’s guideline value.
When IT service providers become MSPs, the transition isn’t always easy. It requires a fundamental change in the way business is done. What you sell—and what you shouldn’t sell—needs to be clearly considered if success is part of your plan.
The use of chlorine to treat and disinfect drinking water and wastewater has been in practice for decades, with the earliest recorded attempt dating all the way back to 1893. Since then, it has come a long way.
This article provides a summary of the changes – including which proposals from the review period were not incorporated – so you can be prepared for the changes and ready for the impacts of the final rule.
Most of us use computers or smartphones on a daily basis. But we usually don’t know what goes on behind the scenes — the technology that allows us to use cloud computing or even Google search. And we certainly aren’t aware of the infrastructure needed to support that technology — like cooling towers.
New York City treats 1.3 billion gallons of wastewater a day across its 14 wastewater treatment plants. The city has seen a precipitous drop in fecal coliforms, with the NYC Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) reporting that fecal coliforms per 100 mL of water has fallen from 1,000 in 1972 when the Clean Water Act was passed to closer to 10 as of 2009.
Everyone wants pathogen-free drinking water, and adding chlorine is a great way to get it. Unfortunately, the dirtier a water treatment plant (WTP)’s raw water inflow — in terms of natural organic matter (NOM) or microbial organisms — the more disinfection byproducts (DBPs) the chlorination process will generate in the form of trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs). Those DBPs increase the risk of non-compliance with the U.S. EPA’s Disinfectants and Disinfection Byproducts Rules. Choosing the right instrumentation to measure NOM through spectral absorption coefficients (SACs) can have a big impact on treatment strategies — in terms of both costs and compliance performance.
On November 23, 2016, FDA published Submission of Quality Metrics Data, a draft guidance that addresses industry comments on an earlier draft guidance titled Request for Quality Metrics (2015). This article discusses the most significant differences between the two documents and what pharma manufacturers and CMOs should take away from these changes.
The quality of drinking water is regulated by a variety of guidelines, such as the EU Council Directive 98/831,2 and WHO guideline. The key principles used to define these limits consider both health hazards and sensory and technical reasons. Iron, for example, does not exhibit a risk for health in concentrations usually found in drinking water.
California is home to some of the world’s most creative minds, top universities, productive farmland, groundbreaking industries — and one of the most epic droughts. The state has endured five years of drained reservoirs and groundwater reserves tapped so aggressively that the land subsidence caused by pumping has been literally seen from space. This indicates in no uncertain terms that it’s time to get all hands on deck. Private companies, universities, irrigation and drainage districts, municipalities — it’s time to pull together into public-private partnerships to address water challenges that face California and so many other regions of the world.
Uncover the less obvious aspects of cost and performance, and understand recent technology advances and trending sanitation demands that will help you choose a system that meets your detection goals.
Water utilities must protect the public health by producing a final product that meets all regulatory requirements. In addition, the water must be pleasing to the customer, with no taste or odor issues. And finally, utilities must stay abreast of emerging contaminants, health advisories, and new regulations. It’s a constant challenge to shoulder these responsibilities while staying within tight budgets. Utilities need a technology that helps them achieve multiple goals cost-effectively.
Almond harvesting runs the risk of including foreign objects in processing lines. Implementing an effective inspection system is critical to brand protection, food safety, and bottom-line efficiency.
Automated metering systems (AMSs) or “smart meters” can provide valuable data for electric and water utilities. Data analytics can be used to improve customer service, boost conservation, monitor the system, and even forecast demand. An ultimate goal might be to eventually monitor everything from streetlight intensity to fire hydrants.
The 34 MGD Otay Water Treatment Plant in San Diego, California serves a population of approximately 200,000. It is a conventional treatment plant that uses coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, filtration and disinfection. The plant receives raw water from two different sources — imported water from the Colorado River and runoff water from three local reservoirs.
Drinking water and wastewater treatment operators are in a hazardous line of work. Beyond the large, complicated machinery they rely on, the use of chlorine and sulfur dioxide is a regular part of operations, two chemicals that can prove dangerous if not handled properly.
This article will discuss how the detection limit for analytical methods can be combined with cleaning validation swab limits to create a detectability scale.
Review the use of Biacore for active concentration measurements, target binding, and Fc receptor (FcR) analysis along with the use of these assays for assessment of drug potency and stability.
