Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Tech Roundup: Drones, Automation, and Clean Water
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Technology continues to transform how the Sewer District manages wastewater and stormwater.
Process Analyst Ron Maichle explains how the District's drone program evolved from emergency-response support to an essential tool for project planning and monitoring. Engineer Joe Reese demystifies the elaborate control systems that allow operators to monitor and manage entire treatment facilities from centralized locations.
What technological solution will transform water management next?
Tech Roundup Introduction
Speaker 1And this is our tech episode Cool tech, cool tech, tech roundup. That's what you should call it a tech roundup. Cool things going on. We're going to talk to Joe Reese about automation here at the sewer district. And with us right now we have Ron Michael, who is a process analyst in our water quality and industrial surveillance department. That's a mouthful, isn't it? It is Welcome, ron. Thank you, you, ron, thank you. You know, Ron, yeah, you know, donna, yes, okay.
Speaker 4We worked together back in the day, the good old days, when I was like in the field and stuff outside. Did you know that there's an outside?
Speaker 1And you're kind of an interesting career because you've moved around a little bit. You've jumped around a little bit and in charge of a lot of different things throughout your career.
Speaker 3I was very fortunate. Early in my career I spent some time in environmental For a while. There I kind of led the benthic macroinvertebrates, or the aquatic bugs. State of Ohio looks at both the fish and the bug communities. I kind of led the charge with the bugs for almost seven years and then became a crew leader on the industrial enforcement side where we were going into companies, we do inspections, we make sure that what they send down the drain meets federal and local limits.
Speaker 3In 2015, wqs decided that they wanted drones to help with emergency responses, hazmat-type incidences that we would go to things like that. Regulations changed in 2016 and allowed for individuals to pass a test to be able to fly commercially and it wasn't until 2017 that we started the drone program kind of what it is today. We kind of did a little roadshow with the watershed group to kind of show them hey, we have this drone, we can use it for some different things. It kind of snowballed into this. Hey, can you come and fly my project? We need some additional information or you know, we want to. You know, tell the story to the public. So we want before pictures and during and after pictures so that everybody can see.
Speaker 3You know kind of what we're doing and these projects are on a massive scale sometimes so it's really hard when you're standing on the stream just to take a shot to see kind of what's going on overall and it's continually to evolve as we get new equipment. We can determine erosion loss taking two different flights and comparing them. That's where the drone program really took off. Ssmo noticed that they were losing some bank erosion, mainly due to the high lake levels. The flights that we were able to show we were losing feet in the matter of months of bank and so they kind of pushed that project up a little bit.
Speaker 4Are there new technologies coming out related to drones? I assume, like most things, everything's getting like smaller and lighter.
Speaker 3Drones are like tools. Each tool has a different function. Currently we have four drones in service. Our largest one is maybe a foot and a half by a foot and a half by a foot and a half by a foot and a half, so it's rather large. We can interchange sensors on it. It's got a 45 megapixel camera, so if we're taking photos for modeling or just overall shots, it's great for that.
Speaker 3We have another one, that sensor that's a thermal sensor, so during the winter, you know, if we're looking for hotspots or something like that, we can, we can use the thermal again, it was mainly for emergency response stuff. And then it also has a 20 times zoom camera on it so that you know, we can still say stay very, very safe, uh, but still get the up close photos that we need. Uh, we've used that for getting photos of outfalls on cliff sides that we normally couldn't get close to because of trees or or anything else. So, um, keeps us safe, keeps us far away, um. And then the last one uh camera that we have is the LiDAR camera that we use, and it's got a 20 megapixel camera on it too, so that we can put color with our LiDAR images. What is LiDAR?
Speaker 4Light detection and ranging.
Speaker 3Think about being in a forest and you can still see light getting through the tree canopy. So LiDAR essentially is when we fly the drone it shoots out this little laser and it receives all the signal back. Not only do we get the tree canopy but we also get the ground or a good approximation of where the ground is at. So you know, we can kind of take away the stuff that we don't want and see what the ground is to get our cuts and fills, even through vegetation.
Speaker 4That's really important on the construction side. I don't know if folks who aren't in that world understand how expensive haul-off is, and so if you are doing, haul-off so if you're removing sediment from a location or if you're digging out a new storm water basin, it can be incredibly expensive to remove that sediment, and so having a good idea of how much you have to move to make sure that your calculations are right when it comes to costs is incredibly important.
Speaker 3So a lot of times what we can do is we can get the original as-built CAD drawings. We put that in when we fly it. Then we can overlay the flight that we did, and then we can subtract out the CAD drawing from the flight to get an approximation of volume of sediment in a basin Veterans Basin are you familiar with that one?
Speaker 4Yes, very familiar with that. There's a stormwater basin in a basin, Veterans Basin. Are you familiar with that one? Yes, very familiar with that. There's a stormwater basin in Parma. The stream flows through it and we're excavating it out so that we can create more stormwater storage, so it'll be a dry, wetland style basin and then when it storms, the water will get held back before going through a very large neighborhood and it'll protect those downstream residents from flooding.
Speaker 3The basin held much less water than they originally anticipated, so once we started giving them the data and the information, it needed to be bigger, and so they expanded it. Those are some of the analytics that we can do with the drone stuff that we do.
Speaker 1You said you're a commercial drone pilot, which differs from a hobbyist type thing.
Speaker 3There's the recreational flyers, then you have commercial pilots and then the third major type is public entities.
Speaker 1Talk about the rules and regulations and laws around flying a drone.
Speaker 3How many podcasts are you inviting me to? There's a lot. There's a drone. How many podcasts?
Speaker 1are you inviting me to? There's a lot, there's a lot.
Speaker 3The big thing is is we're not allowed to fly within five miles of an airport which you can tell is hard around here unless you have special permission. It used to be, you had to call up the tower and they would have to approve it, and things like that. Now it's mostly automated. But then there's also, you know, you have to make sure that you know your aircraft can handle the weather. You have weather minimums you have to meet. So people ask us all the time in the middle of winter hey, go out and fly this, maybe, maybe not. You know there's maybe three or four days that are decent for flight, you know December, january and February.
Speaker 1So do you say that you've pretty much covered all of our assets and all the areas that we work on? Are you still Not even close, really?
Speaker 3Yeah, yeah, we have so many assets out there. We would like to be out there and fly so much more than we can. It was funny I think it was last year I'd been putting off flying easterly for like two or three years and then all of a sudden they had the freak weather storm that came through and we happened to fly like three days before that happened and then we found out that that happened and we were able to go back out and refly it within the span of, you know, seven to ten days, and so we were able to show a lot of the trees that kind of met their demise through the weather event. And you know just some of the changes that had happened the weather event and you know just some of the changes that had happened. So you know some of these projects.
Ron Michael: Drone Program Development
Speaker 4There's four or five years between flights, yeah, I think people don't understand how long it takes to actually do a project. It feels like it should take a year, but really you know, the concept of the project comes up, you prioritize it and maybe at that point you have someone fly it and then you start pre-design and then there's a year of design and then you have maybe a year or a year and a half of construction and then we call again. We're like hey, the project's done, can you come fly it?
Speaker 3again. And it's funny too, because you know the project changed hands and all these different groups too, and so it's really awesome that the people kind of pre-bidding, get us to make these flights so that we can kind of tell these different stories. Hemlock keeps coming up because that was a stream restoration that we were able to show and document the change over time.
Speaker 4That was a project where we did have to do a pretty extensive pre-design just to figure out how to fix the stream through there, because development had come in and they had really channelized the stream, putting in a bunch of 90-degree turns, and folks were flooding with overland flooding from the stream. There was really bad erosion and so Ron's crew came out, did the drone of the original project site and then we started construction. We got a good drone video during construction and then when construction wrapped up, I think you guys came out again. So it's just being able to show the evolution of these projects from a bird's eye view is much easier for people to understand than when maybe they're standing on the ground. I've seen drone footage where they've laid, they've overlaid like shear stress and velocity and like flow direction using drone footage. Is that a thing that we do?
Speaker 3So yes, it's called Open River Cam and basically you take a five-second video and have some kind of static points in the video and then it can show you flow direction. We've used it a couple of times. There's so many technology things that we keep in the back of our bag of tricks just in case they might be useful for something. A software that helps search and rescue. But basically you feed it a color and it'll go through all of your images and find that color and it'll mark it all up so that you're not having to go through a thousand photos. You just look at the ones that have that designated color. Search and rescue blue jeans. So you pick the blue jean color and it'll go through all of them and find that color for you. I talked about the software that we use that basically stitches all of our photos together. So we'll take thousands and thousands of photos. It'll stitch it all together and then you have one nice put together piece and then that's when you can start doing the analytics on it and things like that. That's cool.
Speaker 1What kind of training is involved in becoming a drone operator and you have to take a test to get your license.
Speaker 3Yes, so the sewer district sends everyone to a 40 hour training so that they get used to some of the different equipment techniques, you know, get experience on flying different aircraft and things like that, and then after that we basically ask them to sit for an FAA test and then, once they pass that they're a pilot, we get them on our insurance and they're allowed to go.
Speaker 4Is taking off and landing harder than the flying part.
Speaker 3No, that's probably the easiest.
Speaker 4Oh, really yeah.
Speaker 3Because you just set it where you want it and then you turn the props on and send it up and then it just goes.
Speaker 4Yeah, okay, do you have a personal drone?
Speaker 3I do not.
Speaker 4You don't.
Speaker 3No, you know what I like flying the drones, but some of the locations that we fly, like when we get the special permission to fly near the airport or down near University Circle, it's so stressful that I don't want to do it on my off time.
Speaker 3I hear that and in the early days, you know I was watching, you know, every video about anything drone that I could. I was, you know, reading articles all the time. So now it's like work and I don't want to do that when I'm not here. It's amazing how far it's come in the last 10 years. You know the just the equipment. You know I said we use a 45 megapixel camera. Now I think our first drone had a 12 megapixel camera on it. Flight time was 15 minutes. Now it stays up for over 50 minutes. It's neat how quickly the drone equipment has come in such a short time.
Speaker 4Thanks for coming in today, happy to help.
Speaker 1Ron Michael is the process analyst now in the industrial compliance section of water quality and industrial surveillance. Thanks for joining us. Ron Joseph Reese is an automation engineer in the process control and automation department here at the sewer district. Welcome, joseph, joseph, joe, joe's fine, joe's fine.
Speaker 4How long have you been at the district?
Speaker 213 years. This time I was also instrumentation back, 92 to 97.
Speaker 4Where'd you go in between?
Speaker 2Into production, right into automation.
Speaker 4Oh, okay.
Speaker 2So I did that for almost 14 years. It was a heat treat service. We heat treated jet engine blades. It was all aerospace work. We heat treated hundreds of thousands of blades. We heat treated hundreds of thousands of blades. We had 23 different furnaces that were all automated and did different specs and venues, and you had to pre-approve the production for different vendors, be it Rolls-Royce or GE or all the engine manufacturers.
Speaker 1So what's your background? How'd you get into that?
Speaker 2I kind of got into it because of watching my dad do a little bit of household wiring and every time he blew a fuse he sent me to the basement.
Speaker 4I'm like there's got to be a better way To do what To change the fuse.
Speaker 2Oh, okay, so that spurned my interest a little bit. And then the electricity electronics program with the Riverside's Auburn Career Center is what it was called. They're still teaching today. They did electricity, basic electricity and motor controls the first year, and then electronics and transistors and a little bit of vacuum tube, because they were still around back in the early 80s.
Speaker 2Then I went to Lakeland Community College and got an associate's degree in electronics engineering technologies and I also had the opportunity to work at a high energy physics experiment that resided in a Morton salt mine that was actually looking for proton decay. So I worked with a bunch of graduate students, phd professors, maintaining a bunch of custom electronics for their high energy physics work and that was a government-funded thing. But then it came to an end and I went to the district then after that as an instrument tech.
Speaker 4So when you're at like a family event or you're out in the world and someone asks you, what do you do? What do you do for the sewer district? What do you say?
Speaker 2We maintain all the automation controls. We have a sophisticated computer system that supports all the interaction of all the operators. We provide multiple screens throughout the plant to let the operator do his job. We can see alarms and events that prompt him to heighten his response to whatever he needs to react to. But in the background it's a lot of work. We maintain screens, we maintain programmable controllers, provide the interaction amongst the equipment. We have a whole team of network engineers that just support the network that everything talks over. And then the day-to-day problems and engineering contracts coming through and all the factory testing for contracts panel build, factory acceptance test. Then we've got software factory acceptance tests and then the actual commissioning of the hardware once it's in place and on site.
Speaker 4Okay For our listeners. The screens show what gates are open, what gates are closed. You're able to open or close them, depending on whether that's necessary. The parameters, like the key parameters for wastewater treatment, is usually also up on that screen. You can see if it's high or low or in a warning zone, and it really gives the operator a lot more of a full view, I think, of what's going on in the plant. Because if they're out and they're standing at, say, a clarifier, they may not know what's going on at another part of the plant. So having that full view really helps them control the plant much better.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, because it's hundreds of screens that they have access to in seconds just by clicking and navigating the HMI navigational buttons. The human machine interfaces, that acronym and an experienced operator can zing through 10 or 20 screens in minutes and see different statuses, stop different pumps, open, close gates, your chlorine residual, your bisulfite residual. Then we watch ammonia, we watch phosphorus. All of that instrumentation has got to be maintained by the plant and instrumentation guys.
Speaker 2The cool thing about automation is we have computers that help us support the screens, the graphics, the interaction, the software that supports the graphics and creation and the screen creation. And then the programmable controllers are what interface your field wires to all your equipment, to the computer click of your mouse, and all of these interact and talk in a data collection, communication kind of protocol. So if we say we want this pump in the effluent area, then you're really going to the PLC, a programmable controller in that area, and saying I want to start this pump. And there's over 100 programmable controllers. That Easterly we probably got close to 2,000 hardware assets that support all of the automation district-wide. It's amazing to see how much it's grown, especially at the district, because now you can run a plant with four or five people, and back in 97, they had almost an operator in every unit. Wow, yeah.
Speaker 2It's very powerful to let one operator be very versatile and interact anywhere across the plant. They need to be.
Speaker 4I would think it would help people respond to changes much more quickly.
Speaker 2Yeah.
Speaker 4And in doing so, you'd be able to maintain the stability of the plant, which is so important.
Speaker 2Yeah, so it's pretty good and pretty interesting to see how it all interacts. I always try to say I want to think like a new operator. How would somebody coming in new best understand what this is Right?
Speaker 4So I know we've been in a few meetings together about chemically enhanced high-rate treatment and it seems like they try to include you while they're going through the design of some of these new parts of our plant. How critical is that?
Speaker 2It's very critical. That's why we try to call ourselves a subject matter expert and be able to lean in on their understanding of automation and how we do it, because we have defined standards and practices.
Speaker 4One of the things that we talked about in some of those meetings were power. How are these things being powered? And then, how are these things being connected?
Speaker 2Most of the automation equipment is networked over Ethernet. The servers provide for the access to the clients, which are the terminals. It also provides for the historical access for all the archive data, and that data is saved then Okay, and I can go get seven years of data in two minutes.
Speaker 4If there was, like, a power outage in the area, what would happen? Would it get kicked out of the generator?
Speaker 2So every programmable controller has a backup, uninterruptible power supply. Okay, so it's a battery backup power source. We also have an energy initiative that will be asked to kick the plant off the grid.
Speaker 4So that energy initiative you're talking about that was through our sustainability group. When Cleveland, Northeast Ohio, is pulling a lot of power, they request that we step off the grid.
Speaker 2essentially, it's called load shedding.
Speaker 4And okay, load shed, yep, and run off of these generators so that there's more room on the grid, because we do pull a lot of power to run our plants.
Speaker 1How often does that happen, where we hop off the grid A couple times a week?
Speaker 2lately.
Speaker 4Oh, really oh really, with it being so hot.
Speaker 1Oh, okay.
Speaker 4Oh wow, I didn't know that. Yeah, it was set up so that there'd be more room on the grid for everybody else, basically.
Speaker 1Pretty simple to hop off the grid like that and hop back on.
Speaker 2Yeah, each release 12 megawatt and we can transfer off the grid in 10 minutes or less.
Speaker 4That's crazy, but it would have been a lot of responsibility on you and your team to make sure that that could happen pretty seamlessly, right yeah?
Speaker 2Wow, it's a little bit of handshaking with the generator saying are you ready to run?
Speaker 4Yeah.
Speaker 2It'll say, yeah, I am, and it'd say, okay, we'll issue a start, and then it says, okay, I'm up and running. So the alertness and the awareness that the HMI gives you. There's nothing we can't tell you. It's just a matter of what's important and at what priority do you need to?
Speaker 4know it. Yeah, and when you say you're programming these things, is it like computer programming Like you would think of, like SQL or something like that, or is it a different kind of program.
Speaker 2This is what you call programmable ladder logic, Ladder Ladder logic. So rather than stringing your wires, you're stringing your lines that mimic wires to make the functionality you do, and then you do your standard digital discrete programming. You do Okay, and then you do your standard digital discrete programming. You've got and or, nor not exclusive or, and you program your situations for what you need to happen.
Speaker 1What's the hardest project you ever worked on?
Speaker 2One of the ones was we got a polymer system in, but we didn't have a means to flush the polymer out of the pipe, and if polymer sits in a pipe too long it turns into like bubble gum. So we had to go in a freshly designed system and implement a flushing system, and so I had to work with the plant electricians. We had to get the electrical drawings, get the documentation, confirm that they were right, determine any inaccuracies in them, and then the plant electricians and instrument techs would do the wiring and I would do the programming. Then we'd have to go through a commissioning phase of testing it. Does it really work the way we need it to? Is there any flaws in our design? Do we need to catch anything else?
Speaker 4I feel like you have a very high-risk, high-reward job, risk, high reward job. It's so important that we're able to control all the operations that we have going on, but it does feel like if something goes wrong, it could really really go wrong. If somebody wanted to do your job in the future or go into automation, what would you recommend? How would you recommend they do it?
Speaker 2Definitely a good hardware understanding of electrical and hard wiring and motor operation. But then the skill set, computer skills. These kids nowadays with you know, got phones in their hands at three are just mind-boggling of what they pick up and how much. But it's a lot to pick up. I've had computer in my job almost forever. Just the desire to be in a computer environment. I'm in software and hardware as well, and just to tinker it's kind of funny. I used to be the kid that carried all his Hot Wheel cars around and I'd get a new one at Christmas time and take it apart and put it back together just because I could. So that philosophy just has helped the inquisitive of wanting to know how it works.
Speaker 4Yeah, and you also seem like you're a troubleshooter too.
Speaker 2Oh, definitely.
Speaker 4And that's really important for your job.
Speaker 1And a troublemaker too right, am I right?
Speaker 2Maybe in my younger years.
Speaker 4It seems like it would be an operator's best friend. Do you know what I mean? Like an operator's main toolkit is to be able to use these automations so that everything runs more smoothly. Do you think any of the operators are concerned that automation like AI will take their job someday?
Speaker 2No, because somebody's got to support AI, and I'm not a big fan of AI just yet. I think it's still got a few years to improve. It may work. You know it may prove me wrong, but somebody's got to manage that beast. That's true, you know, it's just another software box.
Speaker 4I like that. Your job seems like you're always. It's always a work in progress, like you're always building onto it and adapting it and making it better. That's really cool.
Speaker 2It's not a standard nine to five or seven to three 30 in my case that you never know what's going to happen next and what's going to have to be handled or designed or implemented. I always say, if you can think of it, we can do it. That's cool.
Speaker 1Joe Reese, automation engineer in our process control and automation group. Thanks, Joe.
Speaker 2Thank you.
