By John Trotti

Three of Distributed Energy’s companion publications—Water Efficiency, Stormwater, and Onsite Water Treatment—deal with water, and while their relationship with Distributed Energy may at first seem something of a strain, I’m going to suggest to you that in many ways they’re joined at the hip.

For starters, they all stand behind the belief that the centralization of our principal infrastructures subjects us to critical levels of risk, and this leads me to the point of this column: Simply put, it is unacceptable that the operation of systems crucial to public health and safety be brought to their knees by the loss of power. Let me provide one recent example to illustrate my concern.

The wastewater treatment system for King County, WA, was designed to handle even the most serious overloads of rain-swollen sewage and stormwater mixtures, a capability demonstrated to its operators’ satisfaction and relief during the record-breaking spate of storms that pummeled the area this past November. But any euphoria that might have surfaced in their wake was short-lived, effectively swept out into Puget Sound along with the filthy vetch of more than 60 million gallons of untreated sewage when high winds accompanied another downpour, dealing a crippling blow to power throughout the area.

The county’s main treatment plant at Seattle’s West Point was overwhelmed and put out of service for a period of only four hours, but it was enough time for 59 million gallons of diluted but untreated sewage to cascade into Elliott Bay. Another facility in West Seattle contributed an additional 5 million gallons when it, too, was knocked offline...in this case for more than a day. Nor did the disaster end there.

Throughout the county, nearly a score of the system’s pumping stations lost power, and while many had emergency generators presumably at the ready for just such occasions, more than half either failed outright or exhausted their onsite fuel stores. Another 9 million gallons of sewage dumped into local receiving waters that included such highly populated bodies as lakes Sammamish and Washington.

It’s a Process
Before proceeding, I want to make clear that it’s not my intent to look for fault in King County’s handling of the situation. Clearly the authority’s operators of the various facilities were blindsided by acts of nature that went beyond design limits. I would also suggest that throughout the nation during the same period of time there were tens if not hundreds of situations of equal or perhaps greater infrastructural consequence caused or exacerbated by power loss. Moreover, I would bet that the majority, if not all, could point to circumstances beyond their reasonable control. But is that a satisfactory answer?

Going back to my thesis statement that systems crucial to public health and safety need to play by different rules, my answer is “no.” Such systems need to be held to higher standards, and in what I take to be a preponderance of these cases, the threat element stems directly from power—or, more precisely, its interruption.

In the King County situation, the availability of standby power at many of its wastewater facilities establishes the recognition of grid vulnerability by the authority. But it is the failure of many of these systems to meet the challenge that highlights the need for a deeper appreciation of what it takes to achieve a truly reliable standby capability.

At the risk of being accused of preaching to the choir, I still feel compelled to point out that for those responsible for specifying standby power systems, it’s not enough to purchase the equipment and set it in place.

Standby power is as much a process as an aggregation of components, and that process is not only ongoing, but one designed to ferret out challenges and hidden flaws that change over time. True enough in any situation, this mandate becomes paramount where the public’s health and safety is concerned.      

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DE - January/February 2007