Faucets run and toilets flush. For the public, those events are so commonplace that it causes real amazement when the expected doesn’t happen.

Scott Branch, supervisor of the Pumps and Controls Group for the City of Salem, Ore., manages a team of technicians who quietly and efficiently meet the expectations of 180,000 residents, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, month by month, year by year.

The Pumps and Controls Group consists of five systems technicians, three instrumentation technicians, a grounds maintenance technician and a seasonal grounds maintenance technician. Branch steps in when and wherever needed.

This close-knit group has created a routine that maintains the city’s water and sewer systems and keeps the members’ ever-expanding skill sets polished. “We’ve got it down,” says Branch. “We have one guy who visits all the pump sites each week. He’s got enough time when he gets there to look at everything — touch the motors, hear things that may be going wrong and run the pumps that may not be working at the time. If we can’t fix it immediately, a job order is created to track the job.”

Five systems technicians rotate through the pump site inspection responsibilities. “We rotate the inspections so it’s a fresh set of eyes every week,” says Branch. “If one guy does it for a month, by the end of the month he’ll be so sick of looking at the equipment that he may overlook certain things. If it’s a new person each week, little things change and catch your eye. That approach has caught a lot of problems.”

Avoiding breakdowns

“Our goal is to catch it before it becomes a breakdown,” Branch says. “We want zero breakdowns. Nobody can ever have that — something is going to go, you can never stop that. But when you walk into a station, if you turn on a motor and hear the bearings clicking, or if you can see that the valves aren’t opening quite the way they should be when a pump starts, if you can notice something before it becomes a problem, you’ve prevented a multiple-hour breakdown that could be costing us overtime.”

Pumps and Controls Group members bring varied backgrounds and life experiences to the job. Stints in the Marine Corps, lumber mills, fabrication shops, paper mills, microtechnology service, silicone wafer plants, food processing maintenance and construction combine to create a highly qualified team. “Our experience level plays into reading the trends, knowing what to look for, and knowing how to identify problems,” says Branch.

Day-to-day tools of the trade run from old standbys like multi-meters for electronics to the state-of-the-art. The technicians use vibration monitors, three-phase power monitors, portable flow meters, and thermal guns. They use laptop computers on site to download information and run diagnostic programs.

The city uses a SCADA program to monitor the system. “We’re able to see 98 percent of our facilities at one central site through that system,” Branch says. “We can see if pumps are on or off, what the flow is out of the pumps, and the depth of the wells. That actually contributes to 75 percent of what we catch that’s going wrong.”

Art and science

Technology certainly plays a role, but Branch believes there’s a mix of art and science to the work. The sense of smell is a powerful diagnostic tool. “A layman would walk in and say, ‘What is that smell? There’s definitely a smell in the air that I’m not used to,’” Branch says. “These guys have done it long enough to recognize that it’s either a heater that has gone bad and is cooking its enamel, or a motor has gone bad and it’s burning the varnish inside.”

Training is a key component of the Pumps and Controls work life but the members still encounter new situations. “We still see things we’ve never seen before,” Branch says. “We sit down as a group, analyze it, go out to the station and find the problem. Now everybody understands when you see this symptom, this more than likely is the problem we are looking at.”

The group set goals and standards to measure performance. Since Branch became supervisor in 2003, overtime costs have been reduced by 40 percent. “That’s not due to the supervisor but to the crews taking ownership of the facilities,” he says. “It’s made a huge difference in how they maintain and keep those facilities operating.”

Branch notes that an extremely aggressive approach to preventive and predictive maintenance has kept the group’s reactive maintenance work to no more than 10 percent overall for water and sewer for the last three years.

Care for the aging

Part of the group’s work plan is to rebuild existing facilities that are not to standard or are creating overtime issues because of incorrect programming, bad wiring, and operational problems. Reaching that objective gets a little more complicated when working with Salem’s existing facilities.

“Our oldest site was a reservoir built in 1936,” Branch says. “The pump station was installed in 1964. Some of that equipment has been upgraded, but some of the pump parts and valves have been there since 1936. It’s pretty neat to dig up some of that history and work on it and try and keep it there. That’s pretty interesting.”

Even more modern facilities can bring unique situations. In the past, pump stations were built on one-off standards. “One station can be comprised of certain pumps and equipment,” Branch says. “You can go to another three blocks down the street and it’s completely different pumps and different control panels needing different operational skills. That has to be learned. It’s not something that you can say is easy. Everyone in our group has to learn.”

Moving forward, the group is completing new standards for the design, construction and maintenance of new and existing facilities to ensure that reactive maintenance stays at a minimum and that the stations are built to last 75-100 years without structural modifications when adapting to future demands.

Beyond maintenance

Branch’s team offers much more than diligent maintenance and repair services. They actively look for ways to make the system function more effectively. When plugged impellers on existing sewer pumps at some locations required almost daily repairs, Branch and his team discussed the challenge and found a solution.

“There were some stations that we had to send someone out to pull a pump every night,” Branch says. “We were pulling pumps during the day. That’s a lot of man-hours and overtime. Our group decided to try a new style of pump that’s more efficient. We installed new dry pit submersible pumps from ITT Flygt Corp. in Portland.”

Now installed at seven locations, the new technology has eliminated overtime costs at those sites. Reducing late night repair calls is certainly good for the team’s sleep but they didn’t stop there. Another faulty pump led to a systemwide fix and, most importantly, cost savings for the city.

“We figured out the most efficient and cost-effective solutions and provided the summary as a proposal for a project,” says Branch. The initial engineer’s estimate for the project was $250,000. Since the money was not budgeted, the project was to be placed on a project list and prioritized with others.

The response from management was that it would be three years before the project could be included in the budget. The group took it upon themselves to verify the as-built drawings, redraw and edit them, then reconfigure the wiring and reprogram the station. The task took less then three months.

The crew completed all but the reprogramming at a cost of $35,000. All other equipment, parts and labor were supplied from in-house sources. “We calculate that the savings to the city are well over $300,000 if you figure in the overtime costs that were eliminated,” Branch says. “The problem would have persisted for at least three years.”

Getting noticed

The Pumps and Controls Group’s contributions are being noticed by the city’s engineering and planning departments. “It is awesome to see our requests, comments and designs put into use and work successfully,” Branch says. “It’s a huge sense of pride and accomplishment.”

Branch refuses to take credit without acknowledging the other members of his team. “I am very proud of this group and all that they have, can and will accomplish,” he says. “My job with this group is to give them the support and tools they need to accomplish their goals and work needs without having to deal with roadblocks.

“We are quiet heroes,” he says. “Public works in every city is the only group that touches inside somebody’s home. If your toilet doesn’t flush, all of a sudden you remember who needs to be called. Other than that, it’s almost a given. People become comfortable turning on the tap and flushing the toilet and it works. It’s always going to work.”

In Salem, that’s because Scott Branch and his Pumps and Controls Group are always on the job. “It’s like an extended family,” Branch says. “When you look forward to coming to work and being with the guys, it’s a good feeling. Not a lot of people are able to do that. I feel pretty lucky.”