When project accounting goes bad

This project, “$27M down the drain with Manotick pipeline plan” seems odd.
$27 million for 376 homes?
A real estate guy on my hockey team recently said upon hearing that I was a water engineer, “That’s smart business. We always say, ‘follow the sewers’ cause they lead to the money.”
In this case, it seems like the City is trying real hard to ensure the developers / “Minto-owned lands” will be the ones making the money. Course the City is a Janus beast and is opposing the development at the same time by going to the OMB which is easily explained by understanding that action is originating in a different department. Not like two departments would ever consider coordinating their actions.

It’s Time To Drink Toilet Water

Slate hits a note with this article by Eilene Zimmerman. The Netherlands started a practice almost 25 years ago of treating wastewater and pumping it into the ground. In their case though, it was to push back the saline water boundary with fresh water. If they pump out too much ground water they get salt water intrusions.

The waterfootprint.org is an interesting site worth checking out.

Dusting off research: Algae to fuel

Soybeans produce about 50 gallons of oil per acre per year, and canola
produces about 130, LaStella said. Algae, however, produces about 4,000
gallons per acre a year, and he predicted it will go far beyond that.
He said algae require only sunshine and non-drinkable water to grow.
The demonstration pond showed algae will grow even when temperatures
fall below zero. – source here.

I’ve seen an interesting article pointing out that the aglae will grow well on wastewater as a feed source.

Top 10 causes of pipeline failures

A USA report from last year analyzed the 10 most common mistakes for serious pipeline failures. (What defines serious from superfluous I wonder?) More info here.

I think that 7 & 8 are big ones for water and wastewater.

WEAO 07 Conference:INFORMATION DRIVEN ASSET MANAGEMENT – LEVERAGING

This paper by Ross Homeniuk, UMA | AECOM and Hesham Osman, UMA | AECOM was the only interesting paper out of a whole day in the Asset Management track at London’s WEAO conference.

The paper uses NRC CCTV inspection codes (1 to 5 where 5 is collapse) to set up a failure rate model using Markov chains. The result when you recognize that about 3% to 6% of a population of pipes actually get worse enough to move up in the defect assessment codes is that some wastewater pipes have a statistical probability of reaching a useful life of 250 years.

This is a very interesting conclusion because it provides a mathematical method that verifies something that I’ve suspected for a long time. Ever since, that tour of a Roman aqeduct that was built 2000 years ago and would still function today if put into service. Indeed there are examples in the Middle East of infrastruture that is hundreds and thousands of years old that is still in service.

The difficulty is that the analysis of the markov chain only provides a decay curve for pipes that progress to a collapse failure. What about the class of pipe that decays but does not progress to a collapse failure? (Most of the sample data is based on the City of Winnepeg infrastructure). This analysis does not include those pipes that are considered to have failed because they leak like a sieve and cause downstream flooding problems. This a class of pipe failure that is related to an I&I problem. It may not result in a complete pipe replacement but in an in situ rehabilitation technology; however, the result of incurring a capital expense that is a betterman, (extension of service life) is the result.

So I suspect that the analysis may have be a bit too uniform in its treatment of pipe failure types. There may be other ways that a pipe can fail that do not fit in this analysis.  A really interesting bit of work though and very well presented. Kudos to the authors.

Biodiesel Made from Algae in Sewerage Ponds

Interesting article.
Aquaflow Bionomic Corporation has produced its first sample of
homegrown biodiesel fuel using algae sourced from sewerage ponds in its
region of New Zealand.
Check out the wikipedia entry on Biodiesel for more info.

A political rarity; Greg Sorbara compliments Finance Minister Flaherty

I saw this on TV last night and was pleased to actually see and hear one politician recognizing an opposing party’s political work.

“Ontario welcomes the proposed federal Working Income Tax Benefit, which will support people with low incomes. And we are pleased to see Ottawa’s proposal on the Capital Cost Allowance as a way of helping hard-hit manufacturers.” link to source.

All too often the only sound bite that is captured and/or presented is a critical comment that suggests that the budget presented is all crap. This is what the federal Liberals and NDP presented. I think that the federal conservatives have done a couple of good things with this budget including:

• rebates on fuel efficient vehicles *and* penalties on gas guzzling vehicles.
• tax incentives for big pharma to donate medicines to developing countries,
• the working income tax benefit, and
• A National Trust to protect land, buildings and national treasures.

The other item mentioned by Sorbara in the budget is the CCA for the manufacturing to have a two year window to write off new equipment along with the ACCA or accelerated Capital Cost Allowance to move from oil sands to green technology. Unfortunately, neither of these is a benefit to municipal utitilties that are starting to track their investments in capital but do not receive a tax benefit for doing so.

What municipalities need is an capital incentive program that replaces inefficient systems with green technologies for moving and treating water and wastewater.

Nice story

Ottawa picks up some ink on energy saving projects. Full story here.

American Water To Host AwwaRF Asset Management Research Workshop

Interesting bit here.

Report shows St. Mary’s bacteria comes from Ontario waste facility

This news bit reports on a study that identifies the Sault Ste. Marie WWTP as the source of contamination. I think that this is an interesting co-story with this piece.