South Coast Water District is responsible for supplying safe, reliable water to thousands of homes and businesses across South Orange County, California. Their water system consists of nine pump stations, 13 reservoirs, and over 12,000 water connections. The District’s commitment is to provide high-quality potable, sanitary, and recycled water to its community with minimal disruption.
This project focused on three specific parts of their water system: the Groundwater Recovery Facility (GRF), which injects locally sourced water into the distribution system; the South Coast system itself, which is the primary potable and recycled water supply; and the Joint Regional Water Supply System (JRWSS), a regional cooperative system managed by the District for several neighboring utilities.
Enterprise Automation had previously worked with the District to create a 7-10 year SCADA master plan. This plan laid out the path for modernizing and consolidating their control systems in phases. This project represented an important intermediate step toward that vision by migrating standalone InTouch applications into a single, manageable platform.
Each of the District’s three InTouch SCADA application independently controlled and monitored one of the three water systems: South Coast, GRF, and JRWSS. The three control systems operated in isolation, each with its own alarms, databases, and configurations. This setup caused several challenges. Operators had to log into different systems to monitor various parts of the water network, and any system updates or configuration changes had to be made in each SCADA application. Alarm notifications were not synchronized, so alerts acknowledged on one system did not reflect on others, increasing the risk of missed or duplicated alarms. Additionally, the hardware supporting these systems was aging, scattered across multiple locations, and becoming increasingly difficult to maintain.
EA took a carefully phased approach to modernize and consolidate the SCADA environment. The goal was to make life easier for the operators and engineers who depend on these systems every day by reducing complexity and duplication.
Each of the three InTouch systems had its own tag database, IO drivers, alarms, and historian connections. This meant that even small changes, such as updating a common tag or alarm condition, required repeating the work across all three systems. EA brought these applications into a managed InTouch configuration within the AVEVA System Platform Galaxy environment. This integration simplified administration by allowing the three SCADA applications to run inside a single Galaxy Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Operators and engineers could then manage, edit, and deploy changes across the entire water system from one unified interface.
One of the District’s pain points was alarm management. With three separate alarm systems, alarms acknowledged on one thin client did not sync with others. To solve this, EA implemented the Alarm Hot Backup Manager tool, which synchronizes alarm acknowledgments and history between a central TopView server and redundant servers. This setup ensured that when an operator responded to an alarm anywhere in the system, that action would instantly update across all clients and backup servers. With a reliable, redundant alarm infrastructure, operators could stay on top of critical issues and not miss notifications.
Behind the scenes, the SCADA infrastructure ran on aging physical servers and workstations spread out over multiple locations. This arrangement made maintenance time-consuming and increased the risk of downtime. To address this, EA replaced all physical hardware with Hyper-V virtual machines hosted on centralized, modern server clusters.
This virtualization provided multiple benefits: it improved system stability, simplified ongoing maintenance, and allowed for flexible scaling. The system was newly designed to accommodate future expansion, including the possibility of adding high-availability clustering and network redundancy at both the server and storage levels.
Throughout the project, EA created detailed, easy-to-understand documentation, including the SCADA system manual, network design documents, and operational guidelines. These resources were crafted specifically to support effective knowledge sharing and future maintenance. In addition, EA conducted hands-on training sessions and workshops for operators and IT staff. These sessions familiarized them with the new system architecture, workflows, and procedures. By investing in knowledge transfer, the District reduced their long-term support costs and empowered their team to manage the system independently.
This intermediate step of migrating to managed InTouch within System Platform demonstrated the viability of centralization, saved time by eliminating the need to make duplicate updates, and provided a foundation for future expansion within a familiar SCADA environment. In the coming years, EA will continue partnering with the South Coast Water District as they build out their infrastructure as envisioned in the master plan.
