The City of Huntington Beach owns and operates the water utility and wastewater collection system which serves over 200,000 citizens. The utility’s assets include sewer lift stations, wells, reservoirs, flood stations, and turnouts for reselling imported water to local cities and agencies. The City engaged EA through consecutive 3-year professional services agreements to provide SCADA integration and support for its water utility department.
The project’s objective was to upgrade the City’s sewer lift stations. This included standardizing panel drawings and PLC programs, implementing panels and PLCS in new lift stations, and upgrading 3 sites. EA integrated the PLC programs and panel designs for the new lift stations that were constructed to replace the old ones that were unsuitable for upgrades.
These solutions empowered the City to address operational challenges proactively. The SCADA integration and upgrades minimized the risks associated with older PLC programs and gave the City increased visibility into system issues and the ability to troubleshoot and edit PLC code if necessary. One of our priorities was ensuring uniformity and efficient operation across all lift stations. To that, we standardized all PLC programming and panel drawings, modifying wherever necessary to account for any unique aspects of the system.
One of our challenges was minimizing downtime and ensuring uninterrupted sewer system operation. Within three days, we successfully completed all upgrades. The standardized SAT testing confirmed the successful integration of the PLC programming and panel drawings without any issues.
As part of the professional services agreement, EA was scheduled to upgrade 24 additional sewer lift stations, following the same principles of standardization.
