Water and Wastewater Repairs to Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems

completed

Our Objective is to meet the requirements for one main Water Treatment Plant in our largest community and ten Pump Houses in the rest along with a Wastewater Treatment Plant and three lift stations, to give the plant the ability to alert our Operators of emergency conditions. This is called the SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) system, a computer system for gathering and analyzing real time data. SCADA systems are used to monitor and control a plant for water and wastewater control, sending messaged remotely to the Certified Operators. In the largest plants this system is outdated and spare parts have become impossible to obtain. We recently experienced failure and came close to total shut down for weeks. We were able to rebuild this latest card for one last time. We are currently looking for spare cards in North America. This project output is related to us getting a full upgrade by changing out all Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) components and putting us on the new operating platform entirely. This upgrade will replace the current outdated system and eliminate the precarious situation of pending program failure, which would mean complete failure of Water Services. Secondly the smaller Pump Houses all lack SCADA Systems and don’t meet the criteria for First Nation Safe Water Protocol. These pump hoses will be equipped with smaller units that can be monitored by the main plant and also contact the Operators on a 24 hour schedule for Water Treatment failures. Our First Nation consists of a very large land mass and we have eleven (11) Communities, which in turn gives us a very challenging job to meet the needs of our membership. Effective response to water and wastewater emergency conditions will reduce the health burden on the Provincial health care system.