Finished water storage facilities play a
key role in maintaining the quality of
drinking water ultimately received by
consumers. Without proper design,
operation, and maintenance of these facilities,
stored water may easily become stagnant and
subject to loss of chlorine residual, as well as
bacterial regrowth, contaminant entry, and a
host of other water quality problems. Given
that finished water storage facilities are part
of the country's problem with aging infrastructure
and that distribution system water
quality is increasingly becoming a focus of
regulators and customers, water utilities need
all the tips they can get to better maintain
these facilities.
This paper outlines a five-step
approach to developing an operations and
maintenance program for finished water
storage facilities. The five steps are:
understand your facility;
define the water quality
problems;
evaluate alternatives to address
water quality issues and select the best
solutions;
implement good management
practices and monitor effectiveness; and,
develop standard operating
procedures.
If utility managers implement this
stepwise approach, the quality of water in the
distribution system will most likely improve,
which will improve public health protection
and regulatory compliance. To be successful,
though, this approach needs support from
utility management to provide the resources
operations staff will need to perform the
work.
For utilities that do not have a tank operations
and maintenance program, this paper
explains the need for such a program, and it
offers a practical approach to setting it up.
Utilities that already have a program in place
may find additional ideas in this paper to
refine their program. Includes 16 references, tables, figure.
| Edition : | Vol. 94 - No. 4 |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 380 KB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 10 |
| Published : | 04/01/2002 |
