Town of Farragut’s Post

Do You Know What an Operation and Maintenance (O&M) Manual is for Your Sewer System? Call Us! +1 (602) 692-7648 My name is Dave Bartholomew. My company, Bartholomew Water Services, is a three-generation family business that services all of Arizona, with special focus on Maricopa County. We’re experts on water and wastewater treatment in the state of Arizona. We work routinely with real estate developers and their engineers to shepherd them through the often byzantine regulations of Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality. For instance, a lot of developers have no idea what an O&M Manual is. But they should. They must! They’re legally responsible to create such a document. (Believe me, I’ve seen it happen where people get fined for not having one. It’s not pretty.) A lot of times engineers try to cut corners. They fill out a two-page sheet which they think will pass. Uh-uh. No. Avoid the hassles, the lawsuits, the fines.  Let Bartholomew Water Services write your O&M Manual for your building complex—the right way. In fact, let us save you time, money, and headaches by helping you plan, design, build, install, test, and maintain your wastewater treatment system right from the get-go. Remember: an ounce of prevention is worth many thousands of gallons of cure. You do NOT want to build your system incorrectly. Again, I’ve seen this happen and it always turns out to be a grave mistake. Do things right the first time. Hire an expert. Hire Bartholomew Water Services. You will not be sorry. I promise.  +1 (602) 692-7648 #wastewater #watermanagement #scottsdaleaz #phoenix #gilbert #arizona #sewer

Stormwater Quality Permitting Process Challenges The major challenge we hear from customers who attempt to obtain a stormwater quality permit in Houston themselves, is that regulators are inconsistent in their approvals. This sometimes leads to rejecting permits this year when they approved the same permits last year. The problem is that compliance is often a judgment call on the regulators – who are only human. Because of this, compliance is often a moving target. Unfortunately, not knowing what is and isn’t compliant and hoping for the best can get you into legal trouble and jeopardize the engineer’s seal. https://lnkd.in/eevE5mka #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #harriscounty #houston

Stormwater Quality requirements have been a reality for non-residential property owners and managers for almost 20 years in Texas. The program initially required large cities and counties with populations over 100,000 to produce a SWMP (Stormwater Management Plan), which defines how the city will manage stormwater discharges and the pollutants associated with them. Today, that program has been expanded to cities with over 10,000 people, which means that all of the metropolitan cities, as well as most adjacent communities in Texas, have some stormwater quality requirements. Do you have questions about stormwater quality compliance in Texas? Ask our experts to see how we can help you: https://lnkd.in/gSJkHhjE #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #texas

If You’re an Arizona Real Estate Developer, Why Haven’t You Called Us?!? Let’s say that you live in Arizona and you’re a wastewater management expert. In other words, let’s say that you’re me. Here’s the typical setup you find when you get a call to come to a brand new residential complex: Lift station with a forced main that pushes to a gravity sewer that dumps itself into a municipal street system. Which, at that point, carries the wastewater to a processing plant for recycling. Got all that? Okay, probably not. But that’s why I’m in business. And I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone out to a brand new site where they trusted their project engineer to do everything correctly … Only to find that this person had no idea what they were doing. From a wastewater perspective, I mean. Imagine letting your owners move into their new residences and having the sewers back up. Or imagine the adjacent commercial complex you built blowing a water main. Believe me, I’ve seen it all. I’ve heard the wailing, the gnashing of teeth. I’ve seen the tears. I’ve watched the money get spent. When it shouldn’t have. There’s an alternative. My name is Dave Bartholomew. My company, Bartholomew Water Services, is a three-generation family business that services all of Arizona, with special focus on Maricopa County. Do yourself a favor. Plan ahead and call us today. We’ll audit your wastewater management build for a fraction of the cost to repair it when something goes wrong. In other words, we’ll save you money and headaches. Now honestly, who wouldn’t want that? #arizona #wastewater #sewer #wastewatermanagement

The City of Houston & Harris County Stormwater Quality Permit Renewals Houston and Harris County are unique in that they are the only entities in Texas that require both monthly inspections and annual re-permitting of stormwater quality features. Additionally, they are the only ones requiring a licensed engineer to certify the functionality of the system and its components. Navigating the process of stormwater quality permit renewals in Houston is our lifeblood; we founded our company on managing these permits for our clients. We believe that taking this off our client’s “to-do” list allows them to focus on more important revenue-generating activities. https://lnkd.in/eevE5mka #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #texas

The Harris County Floatables Collection Screen is designed with a maximum screen opening of 2 ¼ ”. This seemingly arbitrary number is based on the diameter of a water bottle or soda can and is specific to prevent plastic bottles and aluminum cans from leaving the detention pond. Of course the screen will block thatch and other debris from discharging off the property as well. The other type of screen is the trash cage with a riser pipe. This design utilizes a custom-made galvanized cage to prevent the discharge of large debris and thatch while protecting the discharge pipe from becoming clogged with debris. Unfortunately, the restrictor holes in the riser pipe (not the screen itself) are often too small to prevent clogging and require more maintenance than the Floatables Collection Screen. In addition to filtering out trash, bottles, and cans, the restricted flow of stormwater allows for the settling of silt and sediment throughout the 24-72 hour drawdown period per design. https://lnkd.in/gSJkHhjE #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #texas

A TALE OF 2 CITIES PART 1 Austin is the state capitol and home of the TCEQ (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality), the state equivalent of the EPA. Sitting over the Edwards Aquifer, Austin and surrounding cities have a vested interest in stormwater quality. It’s crucial to prevent pollutants contained in surface drainage from compromising the water quality of the aquifer, as it provides drinking water for approximately 1.7 million residents in the Austin area. To that end the choice of allowable systems in the region is limited to sand filter ponds, batch ponds, and multi-stage end-of-pipe treatment units. These end-of-pipe solutions often incorporate some sort of high-flow media to filter out metals, phosphates, and in some cases, bacteria. These systems are allowed in central Texas based on their ability to clean stormwater to a fairly high degree. The approval process of these systems requires extensive testing and peer review to confirm their efficacy. This process ensures that the systems employed will perform as intended and be sized appropriately for the intended drainage area. This attention to detail is a welcome sight in a landscape otherwise dominated by unvetted, unproven systems with no performance data. But as good as these systems are, they all require maintenance to continue to perform as intended. While the city of Austin has done a fantastic job in only allowing high-performing, proven systems in their region, they seemed to have dropped the ball concerning maintenance and ownership of these systems. The current maintenance requirement is highlighted in the permitting process and consists of an acknowledgment by the owner that there is a system and it requires regular maintenance. Unfortunately, this message rarely makes it to management, resulting in not just a lack of maintenance, but often no knowledge of the existence of the system at all. The city of Austin tries to visit every stormwater facility once every three years, but that can sometimes drag out longer. These systems are all designed to bypass the treatment flow if the media becomes clogged to prevent flooding. Without maintenance, these systems can go into bypass within the first year, which equates to two or more years of untreated stormwater draining to the aquifer. Certainly not what the program creators envisioned! The typical cycle looks something like this: Site visit by regulators results in violation The owner performs necessary repairs Regulators move on to next permit The owner continues to neglect the system for 3-4 years Site visit by regulators and the process starts over again So we can see that while intentions were good, the reality of little to no enforcement or regulation and no real oversight often results in little to no compliance until the inspector is at the door, resulting in non-functioning systems about ⅔ of the time. Do you have questions about stormwater quality compliance in Texas?

Pilot Channel- The reality of detention is that although it is necessary, developers hate the idea of having to set aside part of their property to provide detention. Especially considering that this otherwise usable land becomes unavailable to build anything and so becomes lost revenue. To regain this land, engineers can make the pond footprint smaller using several techniques, from straight paved pond walls made of concrete or block, to underground detention. These solutions are extremely costly and usually a last resort. A less costly and less radical approach is to make the pond floor as flat as possible to allow for additional water storage volume. However, this approach can create drainage problems, leading to soggy bottom ponds which are not maintainable. To circumvent this, engineers will add a concrete pilot channel to allow the drainage to flow to the outfall pipe with less slope (or fall). The reason these pilot channels are effective is that with a slight grade (about 2%) concrete has much less drainage resistance than flat ground, which requires about 5% to properly drain. So you can see that concrete pilot channels allow for a flatter pond floor which increases the overall pond volume. This equates to a smaller pond footprint with concrete pilot channels than with earthen ones. The downside to this approach is cost. For that reason, we find that county ponds or public ponds are where we see these concrete pilot channels most often used. Private development just can’t accommodate the cost and so these are less prevalent in the private sector. The end result of removing an otherwise necessary pilot channel is a detention pond with a soggy or wet, unmaintainable pond floor. This is an all too common occurrence and one that is the most difficult to fix. The only effective way to resolve this is to add soil to the pond floor and grade it to drain toward the outfall pipe. This approach is costly and so is usually avoided by property owners. https://lnkd.in/gSJkHhjE #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #texas #detentionpond #propertymanagement

Stormwater Management

Have you heard opinions like “you have to clean the system every year as a condition of repermit”? This may or may not be necessary based on the system’s use. Typically maintenance is “as needed” and not necessarily on a schedule. The reality is that all properties are different and so maintenance is not a one size fits all proposition. This is why we must first understand the specific requirements of the system found in the Stormwater Quality Management Permit (SWQMP). Our stormwater professionals can help you determine what is needed and when. https://lnkd.in/eevE5mka #stormwater #civilengineering #stormwaterprofessionalsgroup #texas #houston