Hach Company has successfully demonstrated and evaluated a real-time monitoring platform designed to help water utilities protect against criminal contamination of drinking water systems. The platform, which was deployed in two Utah cities hosting recent major sports competitions, gives water managers the ability to continuously monitor for sudden changes in water chemistry anywhere within their water distribution network.
The Colorado-based Hach worked with the Salt Lake City and Park City, Utah, water utilities in designing and deploying new platforms for monitoring throughout the two municipalities' distribution networks.
Since September 11, federal and local governments have been reassessing the safety of America's drinking water supply systems, with an eye toward identifying security weaknesses in the systems. The most glaring vulnerability experts have identified is the post-treatment distribution system, the miles and miles of pipelines that carry drinking water "downstream" from reservoirs and treatment centres, while delivering the water to homes and businesses.
The challenge was to design and deploy state-of-the-art water testing technologies which can detect water quality changes that might indicate contaminants introduced anywhere along the unprotected segments of the system.
Hach and the municipal officials put in place more than a dozen continuous monitoring platforms that, for the first time ever, had the ability to measure multiple parameters of water and transmit the data for remote retrieval. The platforms were placed at confidential locations throughout the distribution networks in Salt Lake City and Park City. The testing equipment was then connected, directly or via unbroken cellular telephone data transfer with built-in redundancy features, to SCADA systems. This data was monitored on an ongoing basis through the Internet, allowing local water officials to monitor for potential contamination of the distribution network on an around-the-clock basis.
The communications abilities of the units were designed in partnership with Wireless Systems Inc. of Evergreen, Colorado. That company's "Data Door" is a wireless Modbus Interface specifically designed to communicate with remote process instruments, and operates by enabling the transfer of Cellular Digital Packet Data (CDPD) that is available in most metropolitan areas in North America. Besides being capable of connecting platforms in easy-to-reach locations, the technology can also enable water managers to monitor remote wells and tanks and other hard-to-reach locations within a water distribution system.
"The monitoring devices, in effect, phoned home," said Terry Engelhardt, Hach's senior drinking water specialist. "The ability to use this recent advance in cellular telephone technology enhanced the entire project tremendously, because, without a way to constantly monitor the data from the instruments on the platform in real-time, the approach would have been difficult to implement in a cost-effective manner."
Where SCADA connections were possible, the system provided online monitoring with alarm capabilities directly into the main control centre.
Hach's findings from the tests are being provided to select water utility industry leaders. Their work with the cities hosting the major sporting events, combined with an independent assessment by a renowned water security expert, will be shared with other experts in the field as well as with experts from the Sandia National Laboratories, who visited the project sites to study the platforms. Sandia is a multi-program engineering and science laboratory operated by Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin Company, for the US Department of Energy.
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