The municipal water system in Buffalo, N.Y., faces three challenges: aging infrastructure, a declining customer base, and corporate and private customers who are extremely cost-sensitive.

By carefully assessing the system’s weaknesses and focusing resources on problems most likely to affect service — and by establishing an aggressive collection program — the city’s Division of Water has pulled off a delicate balancing act, delivering water more efficiently at a predictable price.

Keys to the city’s success were upgrades to the pumping system and other improvements that helped achieve uniform system pressure, and a highly targeted program of replacing sections of water main that had been prone to frequent breaks.

Since 1997, the city and the Division of Water have worked in partnership with American Water. The arrangement has been so successful that the parties were honored with the 2008 Excellence in Public-Private Partnership Award from the U.S. Conference of Mayors.

On the shore

The city’s water systems include about 875 miles of lines covering just over 40 square miles. The city has an abundant water supply of fresh water from Lake Erie. Its lakefront location was part of the city’s early success: Buffalo was once a major shipping hub and home to the largest steelmaking operation in the world.

At its peak population in 1950, the city grew to nearly 600,000 people, but declined steadily as shipping routes switched to the St. Lawrence Seaway and major industries downsized, moved or closed. The current population is 275,000.

The Buffalo Water Board launched its relationship with American Water with a five-year agreement to upgrade and maintain the water system. Under the contract, American Water handles repair and maintenance of the distribution system, treatment and pump station operation, residuals management, customer service, billings and collection, and repair and installation of water meters.

Part of the lure for the city was the company’s pledge — fulfilled — to make improvements while reducing bills by 8 percent in the first year. The company also agreed to work with local unions, reducing the workforce only through attrition.

Under pressure

“The city had actually owned the water system until the 1970s,” says Jim Campolong, project manager with American Water. “They sold the system and created the board, but they had been under a lot of pressure to make improvements, not the least of which was pressure from the state of New York to meter the service. As a Great Lakes city, there just hadn’t been a lot of internal impetus for water conservation.”

The mains, some more than 150 years old, mostly range from 2 to 36 inches, although some are as large as 60 inches. (The city recently received an award from the National Cast Iron Institute for the cast iron pipe with the longest continuous service.)

The Water Board focused on capital programs that included getting the system into shape, notably by addressing severe leakage and inconsistent pressure throughout the system.

Part of the first order of business was to improve cash flow through metering and better collections. “The system had high receivables,” says Campolong. “We established more aggressive collections to help stabilize rates, while creating programs to help delinquent accounts pay their bills. We were required to collect 94 percent of cash sales with our program, but we were able to collect 100 percent in some years.”

Among the largest customer complaints was variable water pressure. The pumping system has capacity for 600,000 residential customers and a large industrial base, but what happens when those customers leave the system isn’t pretty.

“We have a capacity to pump 310 mgd, yet the average real pump rates are around 77 mgd,” says Campolong. The system relied on five 50-mgd and two 30-mgd pumps to maintain pressure, but they provided little control or finesse. The pumps were simply activated to achieve end pressure targets in whatever way worked.

Cause and effect

“It was clear that we were getting a lot of spikes and transient pressures,” says Campolong. “Around 2002, we decided we really needed to understand the cause-and-effect scenarios that occurred with each pumping decision.”

The system had no computerized pressure monitoring. Some pumps fed back electronic information through telephone lines, but the complete picture was missing. The utility took all charts showing the pumps and pumping systems and graphed, over time, the changes in pump activity against resulting changes in pressure throughout the system.

“When we overlaid the chart showing pump changes with another one showing main breaks, ­we realized we’d hit it,” says Campolong. “When the pumps were switched, we’d get pressure spikes, leading to main breaks somewhere in the system. We realized that the people operating the pumping system had to change the way the system was managed.”

As a test, workers installed a pressure-relief line from the pump headers to the well-monitoring vault outside a pump house near the main pumping station. Antici-pating a pump change, the relief valve was manually activated to release excess pressure. The test was such a success that the city authorized installation of remote-controlled relief valves at strategic tank locations throughout the system to improve tank level management.

“In one year, we cut main breaks in half, from about 300 annually to 150,” says Frank Mangione, water superintendent with the Division of Water. “I believe we saved a million dollars in overtime alone by avoiding emergency repairs.”

Better data

In 2003, the utility introduced a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system to further analyze and control pressure. “We needed to get more detail back from the nodes in the system,” says Campolong. “We needed more information on tank levels and system pressures because we were running almost blind.”

With an understanding of how the total system operated, the utility recently authorized replacement of one old 50-mgd pump with a modern 22-mgd pump. “Modernizing the pump will give us better control to match system demands,” says Campolong. “It will also save energy, because running the big pump while dampered uses the same amount of electricity, no matter how much water it’s pumping.”

That project begins an aggressive phase of pump replacement that will provide more options to match system demands, while eliminating the need for relief valves.

Before the SCADA system, the department also had limited information on the locations of main breaks. “We were experiencing a lot of main breaks that required emergency service,” says Mangione. “At one point we asked ourselves if there was any pattern to them, but we had no effective way of monitoring the system to find out.”

The utility hired a consultant to put together a matrix of the water system and chart the frequency of breaks and the age and size of the pipes. What they discovered surprised them. “We had breaks all over the system, but we noticed that the breaks were clustered around certain lengths of main,” says Mangione. “We might see four or five breaks in a single year on the city block that we were repairing on an emergency basis.”

Campolong observes, “Traditionally, you look at the age and size of the pipes involved and replace a significant length of it on a certain schedule. We asked how we could get the best bang for our buck while benefiting the overall infrastructure.” Rather than replace lines based on traditional factors like expected service life, the water division concentrated on replacing lines in trouble hot spots.

Lining not an option

The Water Board continued its larger capital improvement program, while the division replaced shorter lengths of problem pipe, in sections from 100 to 500 feet. While the city had some experience with cement lining, that wasn’t an option in most of the problem sections, since many of the lines were already undersized.

“One of the chief complaints of our clients was water pressure, so lining those pipes wouldn’t have helped achieve our overall goals,” says Campolong. Ductile iron pipe was chosen to replace the damaged cast iron lines, mainly because of the material’s long life and the ease of incorporating it into the existing infrastructure. Wherever necessary, mains were upsized to accommodate more predictable pressure.

The change in strategy provided good public relations, since problem areas received immediate attention in a way that was tangible to customers. Other benefits of the strategy included fewer overtime hours as construction labor was more predictably scheduled, and smaller, shorter traffic detours as the pinpoint projects were completed. On the down side, smaller contracts generally cost more per foot than larger ones.

Overall, however, the strategy is paying off as calculated surgical strikes lead to an overall renaissance of the system. “Trouble spots are decreasing as we play catch-up ball,” says Mangione. “We’re reporting fewer main breaks and can concentrate more effort on other parts of the system.”

Continuing challenges

The region continues to face economic hardship. In 2003, Buffalo’s municipal budget was placed under the authority of a control board authorized by the state of New York. Because the Water Board operated independently, its operations remained unaffected, but in 2004, surrounding Erie County made overtures to purchase Buffalo’s water system in hopes of achieving greater efficiencies. With the prospect of continuous improvements to the water ­system, the city rejected the offer.

Other capital improvements continue. A $5 million Main Street main rehabilitation program is underway. Because the water system has no elevated storage, the utility has embarked on a $6 million to $7 million back up emergency generator system project to keep water flowing during a power outage. A $20 million investment from the New York State Revolving Loan Fund will see the city’s 93-year-old Colonel Ward Treatment Complex completely modernized over three years.

“With a shrinking customer base and the city facing economic hardship, we can’t sustain huge rate increases, but we can’t run the system without paying for it,” says Campolong. “Our strength is finding out where money can be invested, improving the system by increments, and delivering water to our customers at a predictable price.”