Good morning and welcome to this joint meeting of the Denton City Council and Public Utility
Board.
It is 11 a.m. on the 5th of April, 2021.
I'm Mayor Pro Tem Jesse Davis, your regularly scheduled mayor, is unavoidably detained with
a work obligation.
But at this time, being a joint meeting, I'll first open the council meeting and then Vice
Chair Bill Cheek will open the PUB meeting.
So at this time, I call to order this meeting of the Denton City Council.
Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem, I'm Bill Cheek, I'm Vice Chair of the Public Utility Board.
If we didn't, it is 11 a.m. and I will call the Public Utility Board, joint meeting of
the City Council Board.
Thank you, Mr. Cheek.
I will call our one and only item.
This is a continuation of a meeting that we had back on the 23rd of March and we're not
able to get to this last item.
It is 1 a.i.d. 2 1 6 2 1, receive a report, hold a discussion, and give staff direction
regarding processes, impacts, and results of service delivery during the February 2021
inclement weather event by the Water and Wastewater Utilities Department.
Good morning, Mayor Pro Tem, members of the council, Vice Chair, and members of the PUB.
I'm Preet Sam Deshmukh, Deputy Director for Water and Wastewater Utilities, and I will
be talking about our report on the remainder items from the utility side of things.
Let me start by quickly sharing the screen and then we'll go from there.
Let me know if you can see the screen.
So it is a tag team effort.
I will be going through the majority, almost 80% of the presentation, and will be joined
towards the end, last couple slides by Terry Nolte, who has also been an interim director
for the water/wastewater side of things and as we had transitioned into getting a new
director, and I go through that in a little bit.
So quick agenda.
I will start on the water side of things, go through all the different areas, talk about
our operation impact due to the storm, what changes we had to make or change in operation,
and then talk about lessons learned and improvements.
Kind of similar things on the wastewater side, and then go into specifically talking about
the public communication piece of this whole storm event, and then overall lessons learned
and improvement.
So there are opportunities that we have to improve some of our operations and some of
the stuff that we're working on, and ultimately kind of close it on a high note of what exactly
worked during the storm event.
So let's start with the water department operation.
Our operation is primarily divided into four areas, starting with the treatment side of
things, it's also called water production, which is where we take in water from lakes
and treated and supply it to the residents and our customers here.
So we typically, we have two water treatment plants, typical demand during the winter season
is about 13 to 15 MGD.
When I say MGD, it's a million gallons per day.
So we're talking about a demand that's up to 15 million gallons.
If you can see the breakdown, we have two treatment facilities.
One is a Lake Louisville older facility that's in the heart of the city, and it treats about
10 million gallons a day for taking care of the demand during the winter season.
And Ray Roberts, which is closer to the Lake Ray Robert, right next to the dam, it treats
about three to five million gallons a day during the winter time.
The next area for our operation is the storage capacity.
We currently have five elevated tanks that amount to a total of 11 million gallons, and
then three ground storage tank, two of them are the larger ones are on site at the treatment
facilities and they're about 14 million gallons.
So total storage capacity that we have, it's 25 million gallons.
Then we obviously have the pipes in the ground.
It is our distribution system.
We have larger pipes and smaller pipes and so on and so forth.
Our main focus in that distribution system is to maintain a consistent pressure between
50 and 80 pounds per square inch.
So we have to maintain that pressure so that in any time in the system, the water is not
stagnant, it's continuously moving and that pressure itself identifies that yes, the water
is moving in the system and getting delivered to the places.
And then last but not least, our customer facing or residential facing area of operation
is the metering where we have all the residential meters and commercial and compound meters.
We have approximately 39,000 residential meters and that is our final area of function within
the water department.
So I'm going to go a little bit into what exactly happened and why it happened.
There were primarily two main reasons of what happened.
We on the water production side of things, we were not able to maintain a constant treatment
plant output because of a couple of things, one was the rolling outages and freezing temperatures.
So that really impacted our operation.
We're not able to maintain a constant plant output.
And then the second thing happened was the peak demand was increased, almost doubled,
went from a typical demand of 15 million gallons to a 13 million gallon a day, primarily caused
due to some of the dripping faucets, and we had issued some conservation requests, made
some public appeals.
We'll go through that in a little bit.
Those were the two primary reasons is not able to maintain a constant output and then
a considerably higher demand for this time of the year.
So why did it happen?
In the treatment facilities, I'll start with Ray Robert treatment plant that was really
impacted severely as compared to Lake Louisville.
Ray Robert facility had five outages within a six hour time period.
This was starting 6 a.m. early morning, Monday morning, and went through noon.
And just to give an idea of what happens once an outage kicks in, it actually impacts all
the aspects of the plan.
So the operators have then have to go through the plan and look at every operation to make
sure that everything is back to normal and then give the thumbs up for the whole operation
to begin.
So it takes a while for us to go back once one outage happened.
Then imagine that in a series and sequence, you have five happening and just disrupted
the production side of things.
The other thing that did happen, we had an ozone generator failure right around the time
during this Monday power outages.
We also had some impacts due to the weather on the backup generators and then also some
of the chlorine feed lines, which are fairly exposed.
They're not buried down in the ground or they're not necessarily insulated, if you may.
They froze up and that created some challenges for us.
On the Lake Louisville treatment side of things, we had some issues with the intake bumps.
So typically when we say we're treating water, there is an area near the lake where we have
intake pumps, which actually pull water out of the lake and then send it to the treatment
facility.
So we were having issues.
We have four intake pumps at this particular location and due to electric phase imbalance,
only two were operational.
So that considerably impacted our capacity to pull water out of the lake and get it to
the plant for getting treated.
So that's where that particular plant was impacted.
As you can see, there were impacts to both these plants.
Ultimately, our water production capacity was considerably constrained for the three
days between Monday and Wednesday during that snowstorm week.
Oops, sorry, I jumped.
So what happened on the other types of areas that we are involved in?
On the storage side, as I mentioned earlier, there was a significant increase in the demand.
It went from a typical 15 million gallons a day to 30.
And there was a constraint on the plant production side.
So you can see both these really contributed to this storage issue.
Because the demand was high, all the stored water in our storage facility started draining
very quickly.
And you can see on this side, you can see some of these grafts.
You can see the drop in some of the water levels.
So at some point, we're down in certain tanks, it was really minimal.
But overall, system-wide, we were down to 10% to 15% of the storage capacity.
So that was a really critical element that we had to monitor constantly.
Because it did impact one of the key concerns here was public safety.
So if we did not have enough water in our storage system and did not have enough water
to pump out when it's needed, it created a public hazard or public health issue in case
there was significant fire, in case there were significant other emergencies that required
water.
So that was critical.
We were monitoring constantly.
I do want to point out that that was a concern that staff was constantly looking at.
On the distribution side, where the pipes in the ground, because of the freezing temperatures,
we had more than normal average breaks.
Typically, we have about three breaks a week during the month of February or throughout
the winter itself.
And in this particular week where the storm hit, we had 16 water main breaks.
And then obviously on the meter side, we had a significant increase in requests from residents,
not just to turn off water, but also report some of the leaks.
And typically, we get about 90 tickets a week from residents, meaning they will call in
and provide concerns that, hey, we need to turn off water, and there were issues with
our connection.
In that particular week, we had 740 tickets.
So as you can see, there is a considerable impact on our operation on the water side
of things, not just at the plants, but every single aspect of our operation was impacted
during that week.
Obviously, there were some other concerns that were happening.
We had staff that had to continuously work around the clock.
We have a specific number of plant operators that had to continually work.
We had to schedule them appropriately.
There were some staffing issues with our technical staff, our electrical staff that was attending
some of these pumps and voltage and phase imbalances had to be reassigned.
So we had some concern.
We had some staffing issues there.
Also, there was unreliable communication.
Some of these towers for cell phone and some of the communication towers were impacted
because of the power outages, and we were not getting reliable and constant communication.
You can actually see some of these graphs don't have a full reading set because of unreliable
communication in our network and in our SCADA system.
And then last but not least, obviously, transporting things had become an issue due to the conditions
on the road.
The roads were sleek, ice everywhere.
It was very difficult and I'll come to the point why that transportation piece was also
impacting our operation and when we get to what exactly did we change and how did we
deal with these different things.
So mitigation, what did we do?
As these problems were happening, the first thing we wanted to make sure that we actually
addressed our main concern, which was the public safety concern.
So we did issue a request for residents to start conserving water because we had that
constraint capacity at the treatment facilities and then also considerable high demand for
the three straight days.
So the Ray Roberts plant on Monday, as these power outages were very frequently occurring,
we switched to the generators.
Initially, we had some issues with the generators, but we were able to overcome those issues
and then restored continuous power supply to the treatment facility.
We also had to bring in our in-house electrical folks to replace some of the damaged electronic
components in the ozone generator, which was impacted due to the outages and fluctuation
in electricity there.
And then last, we had to change our chlorination process.
So since the pipes that were providing chlorine to the water were frozen, we began using bleach
to chlorinate.
And you can see on this side of the screen actually a picture showing our folks bringing
in bleach on trucks.
There's a tote sitting on top of it, and that's where the transportation was required.
This is where we required folks from another department to help us to move this bleach
and bring it and feed it externally to chlorinate water.
And I do want to point out one thing when you say bleach and chlorinate water, this
is a standard process.
It has been used on the other treatment facility, so this is not something new that we had to
invent or it's not a tried and tested method.
It is a tried and tested.
We are already using this.
So switching to that particular process really helped us continue operation at this particular
treatment facility.
On the Lake Louisville treatment facility, there were considerable issues with the electric
supply phase imbalance.
And we had to work not only water staff, but we had to work with DME staff tirelessly for
three straight days to troubleshoot every single piece of not just the electronic side
of things, but even the pump side of things and motor side of things.
So we had to troubleshoot all of the things that were connected to the system.
So ultimately, I think at the end of the third day, we were able to fix the problem.
We were able to get the facilities back and running and the intake operation back.
So that was our main focus in stabilizing the plant operation and increasing the production
capacity to meet the demand.
Similarly, we had to change operation on the other side of things.
So storage, as I mentioned earlier, we constantly tracked every single tank and their levels.
We almost had an hourly checklist and chart going every single time.
What are the levels?
Are we rising?
Are we stable?
Are we declining?
So we had to really focus on keeping that.
One of the things that we did, we did remove one storage tank out of the system that helped
us add more, start filling up the other tanks fairly quickly.
As the Rosalong tank is a little bit at a higher elevation, it takes a lot longer to
get that tank and pressure build up to fill it.
So we took it offline.
We started filling all the other tanks and get them to a level where we're comfortable.
And then slowly we introduced the Rosalong tank back into the whole operation.
On the distribution side, as I mentioned, we had several leaks.
And in order to address these high number of leaks, we deployed wastewater crews.
There was minimal impact to our wastewater system.
So the collections, since these wastewater pipes are typically buried deep in the ground,
the water flowing through them is actually coming from homes, which are warmer water.
So we didn't have that much impact on the wastewater side.
So what we did, we were able to reassign the wastewater crews to go and help dig up the
trenches, help set up the equipment and help fix a large number of breaks.
So that was a really reassignment that staff really helped us address some of these breaks
very quickly and get things under control.
Similarly, on the metering side, we received a significant number of higher phone calls.
So customer service staff was able to jump in, set up, you know, makeshift areas to start
addressing and answer, I'm sorry, something's happening, oh, there we go, makeshift and
answer some of the questions.
And then also we had wastewater staff also jump in again and help the metering staff
go out and start turning the meters off, start helping with water leaks at the residential
service line.
So it was really helpful to reassign some of the staff, a lot of city staff jumped in
and we'll get to that, what really worked portion and Terry gets to talk about that
a little bit later in the presentation.
Wastewater departments, that was all about water.
Now we're moving to wastewater.
I want to start down here where majority of the issues were handled without a large incident.
There was not a whole lot of impact, although there were some minor issues.
As you can see, the wastewater treatment facility saw a increase in flow, which is about 40,
50% higher flow coming into the treatment facility.
There were some impacts from the weather, freezing of sludge lines and freezing of backwash
system at the ropes and ranch reclamation plant.
And then also freezing of some biodiesel fuel, it thickened and it impacted the generators
that we used in the lift station during the rolling outages.
So yes, there was some impact weather-wise as some of these lines started freezing up,
we were able to quickly get staff in and unfreeze them and get the operation back to normal.
And then the other thing, we did see a lot of collaboration, wastewater staff helping
water production address some of these staff issues, staffing issues, and also helping
them provide electrical, technical expertise in addressing some of their problems.
So all in all, wastewater department was less impacted, if you may, compared to the other
operation that we have.
And then quickly go over the public, I know there's a lot of information on this slide,
I don't want you to just focus on this particular table.
These are the, this is just a print of actual notifications that were sent out.
A quick timeline on what information and when it was sent out, I want to point out this
was 2/16, I think it was a Tuesday that we started noticing a considerable drop in storage
tank levels and immediately issued a water conservation notice.
And then we tracked the following day on Wednesday, we saw that the tank levels were improving
but still wanted to maintain that hey, we need to conserve water to get to a comfortable
position, so we continue to issue a conservation notice.
And then on Wednesday, unfortunately, our system wide pressure, there were quite a few
locations that the pressure within the pipe dropped below 20 pounds per square inch, consistent
with the TCEQ guidelines, we have to report it, we have to issue a boil notice and report
it to TCEQ, so staff had to follow that direction from the state agency from TCEQ, making sure
that everyone was notified that there was a pressure drop and finally boil water notice
was issued.
In the next couple days, we really focused on stabilizing the levels in the storage tank
for the water and then also worked on updating the boil water notice.
And then finally, Saturday morning, we were able to lift the boil water notice and cancel
that a little bit of steps in between is not only we have to stabilize, but we have to
conduct sampling and analysis, which typically takes about 12 to 18 hours.
So we started that, we set up the sampling collection on Friday, so the notice was issued
on Wednesday, we set up the collection on Friday where we felt, yes, we're at a point
where the system was back.
And we picked samples up by noon, we had all of them in the lab and started testing once
the test was complete.
On Friday, Saturday morning is when we got the results and immediately issued the cancellation.
So that was a little bit of timeline to understand what was going on on our side versus the outward
facing piece with the public and the notifications.
And then I want to turn to Terry for the last couple of slides.
He is online and he will be talking about the action items or the opportunities for
improvement and then the final slide, which is what worked.
Terry?
Yes, good morning, Council, POB members.
I'm going to go over these improvement opportunities and just briefly describe kind of the actions
that we're going to be taking.
And I'll just point out that during the storm, I was in a role acting as interim director
of water and wastewater.
And I want to thank the water and wastewater team for the job that they did, although we
never like to issue full water notices, we are required to do so under these conditions
and they worked very, very hard to get the system back into operating state as quickly
as possible.
So I'm going to give you all these improvement opportunities and then our new director of
water and wastewater, Stephen Gay, who's online here with me, is going to get the opportunity
to bring these back in front of you to the extent that they require either POB or council
approval.
So the first area we'll talk about is public communication.
I think there was a number of comments that we received that our messages were confusing.
At the same time that we're talking about people running their faucets to drip to keep
their lines from freezing up, we're also asking for water conservation measures.
And I think as Preetam has described, that was a necessary evil because our tank levels
were going down so quickly, we had to ask for those conservation measures.
So we're working on messaging and getting some predetermined messages that are approved
for these situations so that we can avoid the level of confusion.
We've reviewed our SOPs, our standard operating procedures and our emergency plans to make
sure that we're fully compliant with TCEQ requirements and that we have the right contacts
in place both within the city and within the media outlets.
And then social media response, you know, most of our communication these days is through
social media.
That's the most rapid way that we can get messaging out to our customers.
And so we are looking at social media policy issues.
One of the issues is we don't normally respond to social media posts.
And we were seeing some posts that potentially exacerbated the problem.
We had a number of posts where citizens were saying that, hey, there's a main break at
this location, fill your bathtub with water so that you don't run out of water.
And we were not able to respond to those postings.
And we need to look at that to make sure in those situations we have the proper response.
We've heard a lot of talk about weatherization.
And clearly we've got to invest some money in weatherization.
The Ray Roberts chlorine system we will include as part of a project that we have going on,
the Ray Roberts regulatory upgrade, which is a large capital project, $30 million plus
project that we have going on.
We're doing the design work now.
We will integrate those weatherization issues into that design.
Tank levels, the chart that Preetam showed just showed that we lost tank signals.
We couldn't tell how much water was in our tanks.
And that's never a good situation.
So we're going to have to look at how to upgrade those to make sure we always have constant
surveillance of our water levels.
We did have the wastewater sludge line freeze up at Pecan Creek.
We're also doing a solid handling project, which we're doing the design work on that
now and we'll integrate into that design some weatherization.
The Robeson Ranch backwash issue, we are decommissioning the Robeson Ranch wastewater treatment plant
in 2022 and be diverting that wastewater to Pecan Creek.
And so that one's kind of a self-healing.
We're going to be taking care of that without any additional investments.
And then flushing truck bay.
When we see this severe weather coming in, we're going to have to take some additional
measures to get our critical equipment into heated areas so that we can ensure that they're
going to be able to start up.
On the power supply side, Ray Roberts, the backup generators were not operating at the
level or reliability that we would like them to.
We're going to have to look at that.
And again, that'll be part of that regulatory upgrade scope of work.
We have been in contact with the electric provider, which is CoServe.
And as you're aware, there's a statewide effort going on to identify all the critical facilities.
And we've added this facility to the list and hopefully that will resolve our issue.
We still need backup generation there in the event that we would lose that power feed.
The intake pumps, we've resolved that issue as a switch problem on the DME circuit.
And we feel comfortably that we've resolved that with no additional efforts.
The boil water advisory, I just want to make sure everybody's clear on this.
We were forced to make the boil water advisory because our pressure dropped below 20 PSI.
At no time did we have concerns that contaminated water had been pulled into our water system.
This was a regulatory requirement due to that high demand and our inability to produce water
in sufficient quantities to meet that demand.
And so that conflicting information, again, what happened was once we lifted the boil
water advisory, we saw posts on social media telling residents to run their water for 10
minutes before they could consume it and to flush out their ice machines to make sure
that the ice that potentially was made with contaminated water was fully flushed out of
the system.
And in a normal water main break situation where we lose pressure and we have an open
pipe that could potentially pull in water from an excavation, contaminated water, that
would be an issue.
But in this case, since we never had an opening to contaminated water, that was not a concern
that we had.
And we need to do a better job of communicating that.
So we'll be working on communication protocols to ensure that that's clear.
And then one thing that we didn't anticipate, which was having no power to boil water with.
So when you don't have any power to be able to run your electric stove to boil water with,
that's a situation that we had not contemplated.
And so we're considering what our inventory level should be for bottled water and in-house
capabilities for production.
Some other issues that came up because the inability of transportation systems became
precipitously low on certain chemical inventories and we have revised our processes, our standard
operating procedures now to look at those chemical inventory levels at our production
facilities in anticipation of the winter months coming on a potential repeat.
One of your new director of water, wastewater strengths is emergency planning and he'll
be looking at all of our emergency planning and processes and incident command integration
to make sure that they are best in class.
Preetam mentioned the staffing issue that we ran into, which was our instrument and
controls and electricians personnel.
We found out through this process that we didn't have enough.
We have limited staff in that area.
We actually had to borrow staff from DME both from the line crews and from the deck to help
troubleshoot some issues and to provide a level of staffing necessary to meet the demands.
So that's something that as we go through the budget for next year, we'll be looking
at getting rid of that risk if we can.
The number of pipe breaks in homes and the need for us to come out and turn off the meter,
turn off the water to the home at the street was hampered by the fact that we were sending
crews out and there was still ice and materials that were overtop of the meter boxes and where
the valves were, it took a long time to locate a number of these shutoffs.
And so we'll be looking at geolocating each of those so that someone can go out with an
instrument and know precisely where that valve should be located on these homes and businesses.
And then finally, the diesel fuel, this was an issue across all of our utilities.
When the temperature got down and below zero, that diesel fuel gelled and we couldn't get
generators or trucks started.
And we're working with Fleet to see if we can't provide some additives that will abate
that problem in the future.
Go to the next slide if you would, pre-Tim.
So what did work?
Our staff did a stellar job.
Everybody pulled together.
Like I said, we used people from DME, we used people from Fleet to transport chemicals from
Louisville to Ray Roberts.
It was just an amazing show of teamwork.
Our lab provides laboratory results or laboratory analysis with just unbelievable quick turnaround
times.
Having that capability in-house saved us countless hours.
And by the way, they do that service for other municipalities as well.
And they don't get the praise that they deserve.
They do a super job at the lab and they're a very valuable asset to the city.
Strong leadership.
I mean, the city manager's office was, we were on the phone four times a day, every
day for the entire duration of the storm from really from Saturday the 13th all the way
through Saturday the 20th until the incidents were over.
And the city manager's office provided us with the support we needed.
We even had folks from HR that were bringing food out to our employees that had been working
24 hours or more.
Just really appreciated all that support.
And the constant clear lines of communication with city staff were critical, as well as
trying to do the best we possibly could with residents to keep them up to speed on what
was happening so that they understood when water was expected to come back.
And we actually beat our estimate.
We anticipated that it would be early Sunday morning for releasing the boil water advisor.
We were able to actually get it released mid-morning on Saturday.
So with that, Preetam, if you'll take it down, we can answer any questions.
Give me a second.
There we go.
Okay, questions?
Mr. Jumper, I think I saw you first.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
I have two questions, if I may.
You mentioned storage capacity got down around 10 to 15%, I believe.
So I was curious, I didn't catch this if you said it.
What is an acceptable minimum?
What's dangerous?
Like, what does that level mean for us?
Yeah, I would say anything lower than 20% is a danger zone that we need to be very concerned
about.
And the issue there is really a public safety issue.
To the extent that we had a major fire in the city, we'd have a hard time recovering
our tank levels.
Okay.
And then secondly, I have to ask, has anybody looked into the implications of the do not
drip notice?
Telling people not to drip in their lines, did that in fact cause more line breaks?
Has anybody looked at anything like that?
Do we know anything?
We've not done any investigations on that.
I think line breaks are really more a result of shifting ground from freezing and thawing
and the temperature of the water in the lines.
We're pulling water out of the lake and as the lake gets colder, that temperature differentiation
between the water and the pipe, the steel and the surrounding ground causes an expansion
issue and that's really what leads to most of the breaks that we see during really cold
weather periods.
Are you talking in the mains in the main system or in individual houses?
I was speaking of water mains and distribution lines, yeah.
As far as homes go, you know, the theory is if you keep water running through your pipes,
then the ice will not have time to build up and expand and crack your pipe.
So if you keep water running through there, you should not seem to have that problem.
You know, our issue here was that while we wanted to help homeowners to protect their
personal property, we had to worry about public safety and that's why we were asking for conservation
notices at the same time they were hearing that you need to keep your lines dripping
in order to keep them from freezing up.
Mr. Sof?
Yes, thank you.
I had some questions about the 16 water main breaks.
Were these caused by freezing water or by ground shifts or both?
I think it was all of the above.
There were several things that played into that, not only the temperature and the differential,
but also the pipe material, the age of the pipes and where they were located.
I think it was all of the above.
Okay, you sort of answered my other questions because I was curious if there was a consensus
of older pipes, newer pipes, iron PVC?
Correct.
Yeah.
It included all pipe material.
There are some of the larger pipes.
There were ductile iron.
They had breaks as well.
It was not just the particular type of material that was impacted.
Okay.
Were these mains above ground or below ground?
Below ground.
The majority of these mains have to be dug out.
Do you know how many customers were affected by those 16 breaks?
I don't have that direct number on top of my head, but there were several main breaks
that we were able to isolate without impacting the customers.
We did put some of these pieces of pipe in isolation and diverted around them because
we have a loop system in the majority of the city.
Going back to something that Terry said about water flow reducing ice formation, does that
have any bearing on water mains too?
I would assume that there's water flowing through those all the time.
Correct.
Then the other piece to that is how deep they're buried because there is a certain level that
the freezing reaches to and depending on the timeline that how long the freezing is actually
happening, if the pipe is buried fairly deep, it doesn't hit those pipes as far as the temperature
is concerned.
I guess the big question is, and I didn't see it mentioned in the action items and improvement
opportunities, is how do you weatherize water mains?
Do you dig them up and make them deeper or what?
It seems like a real conundrum.
It is a challenge and Terry can jump in a little bit, but it is a challenge.
Obviously, there are freezing lines defined in several regions throughout the US where
there are cold temperatures.
If you go to a place like Chicago, the freezing lines are under three.
Everything has to be three to four feet below ground because that's where the freezing lines
hit.
For areas where we are at, it's about six inches currently, but when you hit something
like this, which is unexpected and stays for more than three to four days, those lines
typically dip down further in.
As a utility, does it make sense to lower all the lines for one event?
That's a difficult question to answer and it doesn't financially make sense at this
point, but Terry can add to that.
Thank you very much.
I don't have anything to add except that really it's just the nature of the beast.
We have development codes that require lines to be placed at a certain depth, below a certain
depth, and that's in order to provide that level of freeze protection as well.
Anecdotally, for a groundwater system where you're pumping water out of the ground at
a constant temperature year round, you don't typically have a lot of main breaks.
Most of the main breaks are due to this big swing in temperature of the water inside the
pipe.
If you think about it, you got very cold water in a pipe surrounded by soil that's a relatively
stable temperature and that contraction because of that cold water in the pipe causes stresses
on the piping system that you don't normally see and that's what causes a lot of the main
breaks.
If I may, one more question.
Go ahead.
You have figures on how many or if there were any water main breaks in 2011 when that weather
event occurred.
Yes, we can pull that information if we have that available.
Absolutely.
I'd really like to see that.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Mr. Sof, Mr. Rybak.
Yes, thank you.
I was curious.
I think it was Terry earlier mentioned PCQ.
I'm just don't know what that is so I'd like to ask.
Yes, T-C-T is in Terry, T-C-E-Q, that's the Texas Environmental, Texas, help me out guys.
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
Oh, T-C-E-Q.
Okay.
So, it's the regulatory agency that issues the permits for our water treatment system
and regulates drinking water throughout the state.
Okay, thank you.
The other thing you guys had mentioned, weatherizing fuel lines for the generators, does that weatherization
mean just insulation or are you looking at heat trace on the lines, tanks above ground,
belly tanks on the generators, can you tell us a little more about that?
Go ahead, Terry.
Yeah, so we'll have to study that and it'll be specific to each of the sites.
You know, theoretically if we can list all of our water production facilities, our booster
pump stations and tanks as critical facilities and they're on circuits that we don't lose
electric on, should this happen again, the level of weatherization probably will be less
than if they have to be operated as a remote standalone operation, so each facility we
looked at individually.
Yeah, so I was a little surprised to find that your water facilities were not on the
critical facility list, I must have been kind of a surprise to you guys too.
Unfortunately it was, yes.
Thank you.
Thank you Mr. Ibeck.
Council member Armentor.
Yes, I have three questions.
The first one is about communication with the fire department.
I was curious, you know, what, if any communication there was either way between the, from the
water department to the fire department or vice versa about the, you know, the kind of
push and pull between the, you know, do not drip your faucets and the, you know, fire
department responding to so many line breaks.
Interestingly both departments, it seems the demand was up about 700% roughly.
So you know, based on what you mentioned.
Yeah, so we, so council member Armentor, we always let the fire department know anytime
that we have a tank, a level issue or a pressure issue is specifically so that they know if
they're responding to a fire incident in part of the city that has a low pressure area,
they know to be prepared for that by bringing tank trucks, etc.
So we were also in communication with them, as I mentioned, four times a day as part of
our, our daily communication with the city manager's office, fire department participated
in that.
So we were able to keep them up to speed on what measures we were taking.
Thank you.
And my next question is about requests for shutoffs and it's kind of divided into two
parts and you can handle it however you want, businesses and apartments.
So did you, were you aware of, you know, and this could be for pre tam or Terry or both,
you know, aware of businesses that were not operational because of the, the, because the
freeze shut down pretty much everything, almost everything, that did not request to have their
water shut off that maybe could have both, you know, benefited those, those businesses
and the community from both a conservation and infrastructure point of view if they had,
you know, there had maybe been a, you know, some sort of communication to them that, you
know, you might want to shut your water off or you have to shut your water off.
And then as far as apartments go, you know, what, what is your sense of the degree of
management owners who requested to have their water shut off out of concern for, you know,
pipe damage that ended up leaving their water off for a long time, either out of concern
about what could happen or out of legitimate, you know, insufficient, you know, improperly
weatherized pipes. So if you could speak to both, I don't expect that you have concrete
data on all this because you're responding to whoever's in touch with you, but just anecdotally
kind of your sense of shutoffs for both businesses and apartments.
I can start with addressing the apartment piece. I think apartments typically have on-site
facility maintenance folks that are aware of where these valves are, where these shutoff
points are, and that's what they typically use. So we don't believe that there were
any significant calls, and I can find the exact numbers exactly of how many apartments
reached out to us, but they have the ability to send that person out there and take care
of some of the issues that they are experiencing on site. As far as businesses that were closed,
and a lot of them were, if we did receive calls from, you know, residents or businesses
nearby, then absolutely we addressed the concerns, but we did not actually reach out or attempt
to address some of these extra calls or extra turnoffs at the time, just given the amount
of calls that we're receiving from active residents to proactively engage more folks
and do that kind of stuff. But I'll let Terry if he has anything to add to that.
I don't.
Thank you for answering that. That makes a lot of sense. You all are so busy, you're
not going to be calling all the different businesses. I would hope that moving forward,
those of us who have lived through this, business owners, property owners, renters, whoever,
have a better sense of, okay, if this happens again or when this happens again, I'll make
sure to shut off the water to my business before locking up the shop or whatever. And
maybe with that 2020 hindsight, notice to business, and forgive me if this was already
done, but notice to businesses, just a general notice on social media and whatnot, an emergency
alert saying businesses, if you are shut down, please turn off your water. That probably
happened already. But anyway, my final question is about mobile homes that depend on well
water. And because of that, it's not a question about our water utility, our public water
utility, but it is a question about public water need. And so I was just wondering if
anything that you have heard anecdotally about mobile home communities that are dependent
on well water, who are not able to get back to normal as quickly as people who were on
city water. Yeah. We don't have any knowledge about mobile home renters or owners that aren't
on our system. We wouldn't have any access to that information.
And thank you. And I realize you don't have the access to that. I know that anecdotally
I've heard and heard about, and I thought maybe y'all had to, about some communities
who struggled for extra long because they didn't have this great resource that we're
all talking about. So just something for all of us decision makers to think about moving
forward as far as public water need. Okay. Other questions? I will make a quick
programming note. The city council has a scheduled quote unquote luncheon meeting at noon. That'll
be a different web link. Anybody who's watching along with this one and wants to see that
meeting as well, that'll be a different web link and it'll be after the conclusion of
this meeting in a short break. Council member Ryan, I think I saw your hand first.
Thank you. I got just a couple of quick questions. One is, this is similar to what I was asking
on the antifreeze at the power plant last week. On the chlorine, is there a way that
if we had it at a stronger solution than what we currently have? Because I know chlorine
has a very low freeze point. I mean, I think it's 150 below that pure chlorine freezes
that. Is that something that we're looking at to make it or is that a regulatory that
you're only allowed to use a certain strength and that's the strength that we had and that's
what froze? I think I can start the answer, Terry, and
what are the issues on the chlorine line was there was a valve that actually opens and
connects to the water that is sitting in the tank and that valve kind of back leaked into
the whole line, which froze the line. It's not necessarily the actual gas or liquid gas
got frozen up. It was more of that malfunction of the active valve and if that ever happens
again, yes, we're running into the same issue, but we're working on is coming up with a solution
that doesn't happen and we address that. Okay. And then my other question is regarding
meter keys because I know a lot of the local supply houses or big box stores, let's put
it that way, sell meter keys that don't work on city meter boxes. As we go forward, does
the city supply those or is that something that the developer would put in as they build
out an area? Yeah, I don't have an answer if we supply
it, but we can definitely get back to you as to how we can address this issue.
Yeah. I'm just thinking the next time, if the city supplies them, the next time we go
to order them to see if there's some that work with a little bit more wide range of
key varieties, because I know I have the neighbor across the street had borrowed a key from
another neighbor and spent, he was out there for 10 minutes, then another neighbor came
out and they worked on it for another 15 minutes. I've got one that works. I walked over there
and twisted and it was up. So if you're trying to shut off that water in a hurry, that makes
a huge difference. Absolutely. Board member Divini, did I see your hand
a little while ago? Yeah, I just had a sort of rookie question
about what difference summer demand would make. Obviously, there was a question because
demand went up, but the demand would not have been as high as it is on a typical day in
the summer. So I was wondering just how important water demand was considering that we have
times of the year when demand is much, much higher than the winter demand.
Yes. Great question. So we do have seasonal maintenance activities that we're performing
at the facilities and during the low flow winter periods is when we're performing our
major maintenance activities. Fortunately, we were not in an outage of any type on either
of the plants during this time, but we were not prepared to be able to produce 30 million
gallons per day in the middle of the winter. We just don't set up our operations that way.
Now that we've seen this incident, we'll be taking measures to make sure that we have
the ability to do that. Councilmember Meltzer?
Thank you. With 2020 hindsight, now we would say there's simply no way that people are
going to conserve water when they need to drip in order to avoid $52500 worth of damage.
If we started with that point of view, if this were to magically happen exactly the
same way, would we have given different communication? Like could we have prepared people for the
clear trending toward boil water notice? But if we see it sooner, instead of saying stop
dripping, which they're not going to do, would we have given different advice? Do X to prepare
for the boil water notice that is inevitably coming?
Let me try to answer that, Councilmember Meltzer. I think that first, we'd never experienced
this level of freezing for as long as it took place. Normally we'd have our tanks full and
we'd be filling them back up at night. The level of dripping that we would expect for
an incident like this would have not been an issue. We should have been able to handle
it. But the fact that our production facilities were impacted at the same time that we had
this large demand and we couldn't remedy those production issues because of the weather,
that was really the problem. As I mentioned, it was unfortunate that we had to issue directives
or recommendations about dripping water to protect your pipes and then come out and say,
well, we really need you to conserve now. That conservation message was really focused
on the public safety aspect of making sure we had enough water if forgotten.
I'm not saying it critically. I understand entirely what the thought process was, but
now we have the benefit of 20/40 hindsight. That's why I'm saying knowing what we now
know about behavior and whatever. Obviously, ideally we're going to plan ahead and the
situation won't recur, but it could. Maybe don't answer now.
I really appreciate your point and I wholeheartedly agree with you that if we could figure out
something that we could have done, and I guess the answer to that would be have our production
facilities in better shape from a weatherization perspective so that we don't end up in a situation
where we can't meet the demand.
I totally get that, but okay. I'm not going to press for an answer, but maybe there is
something that people could be advised to do in the time before if some other set of
circumstances converge so that we do face some kind of situation like this. Despite
our best efforts, is there something we could say in the hours before a boiled water notice
that would help people prepare?
I really appreciate the suggestion and we'll certainly look at it to see if there is something
we can do. With respect to boiled water advisories, we could have potentially notified citizens
that levels in tanks were getting progressively lower and that delivery pressures were getting
lower and that there was a potential for boiled water advisory, but I think that would have
the same effect as the social media posting I mentioned, which was, "Hey, let's fill our
bathtubs now."
Well, it's not irrational, right?
No, it's not. It's a perfectly rational thought process and I don't fault anyone for posting
that or for taking those actions.
It just precipitates the thing you know is coming.
It's kind of like a snowball going downhill, right? The problem gets more and more compounded.
But maybe there's advice like, just to take a little honing, but we know you're going
to want to set some water aside, limit it to a gallon or I don't know.
I think that's a great idea. Yeah, I think that's a great idea.
Council Member Meltzer, I think from this whole incident that occurred and it pretty
much showed us where we have some efforts to focus on. That is one, being more proactive
in preparing our information for sharing with the public. So as you've heard several of
them say, they were going to go back and look at their emergency operations plans and the
media part of it and start to develop sort of fact sheets and things that we can then
have on hand to pull out.
We also need to help educate our population about, you know, exactly what happened here
you heard today is what happens when you have a freeze to this extent and the lines that
we have to maintain are frozen, can't get our generators going and then our water levels
go down. It really is then a matter of us sharing with the public that while in some
cases we'd ask you to drip, this is a matter of having water available from an emergency
circumstance to not drip. And I think it's just a matter of how we start to help share
these messages so that we're prepared better if and when this happens to us again.
Well, I, you know, I'm going to go over it over and over and I'm not, I'm not saying
this out of criticism. I mean, I know that you guys were doing, you know, amazingly difficult
simultaneous, you know, emergency response situations. So it's not my tenor. It's just,
you know, okay, what would, you know, just what can we learn? But I don't think what
we learned is if you explain it better to people, they would stop dripping. I mean,
my starting point is they're never going to do that.
No, no, they won't. You're absolutely right.
Increasing temperatures.
Yeah. I think it's just, we want to, I think most importantly, we want to help explain
to the public sort of what has happened, which we're doing and, and what we would do differently
in the future. You know, this, hopefully we won't experience this, but it looks like it
happens about every eight to 10 years and we may be up for it again.
Yep. Thank you.
Thank you all for that exchange. And I think those are fair questions and fair answers.
I don't think anybody really expected quite the sequence of events. We've all lived through
hard freezes, right? We know kind of what to do, but the, the sequence of events this
time around was a little different. Mr. Sof.
Yes. Thank you. Um, when this happened, um, state regulators seemingly almost tried to
downplay the freeze and its impacts by saying it was unprecedented. Uh, it wasn't unprecedented
as city manager just pointed out, these things happen and are happening, happening more frequently
just as spring is getting here earlier. All sorts of strange things are happening with
the climate. And I think anything that we can do to prepare for the worst and hope for
the best is what we should do. And, um, that's just as a general comment. I mean, uh, rather
than, I feel that rather than looking for reasons not to do things, we should look for
reasons in some cases to definitely do things based upon scientific data. Thank you.
Thank you, Mr. Sof. Other questions for staff? Um, I've got just one kind of along the lines
of what Ed was just talking about. Um, financially, it may not be the most feasible thing, but
from a regulatory standpoint, are we, um, we have a good neighbor with co-serve, uh,
they, they service our Ray Roberts plant usually without incident. Um, but you know, if that
had been an in-house thing, if DME had service that plant, then maybe we would have known
which, which feeder, which circuit our own water plant was on. Um, is it, uh, is it feasible
not necessarily for financial standpoint, but from a, uh, a technological and a technical
and regulatory standpoint, is it feasible and possible to, uh, power the Ray Roberts
water plant from DME or some measure of backup besides just the generators?
Uh, yes, sir. It is, uh, we could run a line up there. It is a dual-serve area and we could
run a line up there. It's just cost prohibitive. And, uh, I know as we talk about reliability
of our water system, it seems a little ironic to talk about cost, um, where the difference
might've been, uh, uh, that we were able to run the plant a little bit better, but, um,
it's very expensive. I can't remember the exact mileage to run it up there, but it's
several million dollars, uh, to run a service up there. And again, our, our, our, uh, co-serve
itself has been very cooperative since the storm. And in fact, during the middle of the
storm, uh, rotated, took us off the rotation and put us on a critical service. So we feel
pretty good that the, uh, the service that we're getting for that facility, uh, is improving.
And as I mentioned, we will upgrade, uh, as part of the regulatory upgrade program, we'll
be looking at integrating, uh, relays and sensor, sensing equipment into our, into our
generators so that they will automatically come online and we shouldn't see the kind
of interruption that, that, uh, Preetam mentioned requires us to go out and re-recheck all the
equipment. We can put some technology in place that will enable that, that generator to start
up automatically due to power quality issues. Um, that will, that will go a long way to
improving the reliability of the facility.
Much cheaper to soup up the generators than to run in millions of dollars worth of power
lines. And I imagine that's probably, that's a dual service area. I'm sure that's an analysis
we did when we built that plant as well, why we have co-serve power out there. Uh, Mr.
Sheik.
Just one quick thing, and I'll continue to praise staff on the job that they did and
getting people out and getting out there, um, keeping us, keeping us alive. I really appreciate
it. Um, one recommendation we, there was a plan about 15, 20 years ago at the CFDN where
they outreached the various departments to business community for emergency help. Um,
I suggest that you look into that as well. I think there's some help to be had there.
Um, I think a lot of businesses, what I'm involved with, when it's freezes outside,
we don't do a lot. So all we can do is help with the equipment that we have. And I think
there's a lot of other businesses out there that can contribute. That was it.
That's a great point, Bill. Thank you. Other questions for staff? Go ahead, Councilmember
Johnson.
We were able to get those water mains repaired and up and running within, uh, a day or that
day or so. I recognize the fact that we have water mains that break summer and winter.
So I guess that there is really going to not be a real solution to whether or not they
break or not. But I think that the most important really is that we get them up and running
as quickly as possible so that people don't have to go without water and as well as the
streets that are going to be torn up because of that. So were we able to work within that
week or in that few days of getting those that were broken during that time up and running?
Correct. We, we were able to get a majority of them up and running. There were a couple
that were isolated that had some additional issues. But as a result of that isolation,
the service was not impacted to the residents. We were able to circulate or bypass those
areas and then come back and do the repairs. But yes, majority of them were repaired within
acceptable time limits. This is where we had some extra help from our wastewater folks
coming in and helping us to address them quickly.
Any other questions on this agenda item? Very good. Seeing none, I want to echo Mr. Cheek
and thanks staff for their excellent response during this event. A million things happening
at once. Each next step was uncertain. And, and board member DaVinci's got found the applause
button there on zoom. So just a quick program note, as we close out, we do have the council
luncheon coming up. We're going to start that at 1220 for council members. It's a different
zoom link. It's a different web link for those following along at home. And we'll start that
at 1220. So at this time, I will conclude the Denton city council meeting and Mr. Cheek
and we'll stand adjourned with the BUB. Thanks, y'all. Thank you.