Monday, April 21, 2014

A CCWD Tour by Dennis Dooley

A CCWD TOUR
Please come with me on a tour of the Calaveras County Water District system.   The information I am about to give is accurate to the best of my knowledge, however these statements are mine alone as one of the five directors, and I do not presume to speak for the district officially.   I am going to start by taking you to all on a tour of the major facilities which cover all four corners of the county.   I don’t believe one could cover all these facilities and spend a few minutes at each facility in only two days.   I will use an acronym for “get in the vehicle and drive” (GIVAD) to shorten up the wording somewhat.   We will start this tour from the headquarters in San Andreas and end up there again at the end of this tour.
First, GIVAD to the Copper Water treatment Plant (WTP), which is 23 miles from headquarters via the slow and windy Poole Station Road.   Do a quick tour of this plant only and don't bother about touring the infrastructure, tanks, intake pumps and all the other items that go with this plant.


 
Next, GIVAD and drive two miles to the Copper Wastewater Treatment Pland (WWTP).   Again, do a quick tour of the treatment plant, but don't bother about the collection system, pumps, sprayfield and disposal areas, and holding ponds.
From here drive 34 miles to the Collierville Powerhouse at Camp Nine on the Stanislaus River, which is nine miles up a narrow and windy road beyond Vallecito.   This is a 250 Megawatt powerhouse which is owned by CCWD and operated by Northern California Power Authority.   This would be a subject that should be covered in another article, but it is beyond the scope of this article.   The whole North Fork Power system has a value on near One Billion dollars, but with the financing and operational costs, CCWD is only getting approximately about $500,000 income from this, much of which goes to water and wastewater rates.
From this facility, GIVAD and drive 12 miles back to Vallecito and up to the Douglas Flat WWTP and do a quick tour of the plant only.   This is the treatment plant which collects the sewer from the communities of Vallecito and Douglas Flat.   By the way, this plant was recently the recipient of a $4,000,000 state grant for a new, state of the art membrane treatment plant that is doing a really great job of treating the sewage.
From here GIVAD and drive three miles up to Murphys and out Pennsylvania Gultch Road to a small community leachfield wastewater treatment system which services the small Indian Rock subdivision.   There is very little to see above ground, but an operator must make a daily visit to this system to check the operation, log needed entries and collect samples for analysis.
Next, GIVAD and drive seven miles back out to Murphys and up to Forest Meadows WWTP.   Do only a quick tour of the plant only, and then GIVAD and drive five miles up to the Hunter Dam WTP near Hunter Dam Reservoir.   This is the plant that treats all of the water that serves the Ebbetts Pass areas from Forest Meadows up to Camp Connell.   The main trunk for this system runs some 15 miles along the Highway 4 corridor and runs from under 3,000 feet to over 6,000 feet in elevation.   The one main exception is for the water system for Blue Lakes Springs which is its own Mutual water system and gets its water from wells.  
GIVAD and drive one mile over unimproved back road to the Collierville Tunnel Tap which is the source of water for Hunter Dam WTP, and the primary source of water for Utica Water and Power Authority, Union Public Water District, City of Angels, and in-stream flows for Murphys/Angles Creek.   This tunnel tap has a very complicated ownership and permitted arrangement between CCWD, NCPA, and UWPA which is way too complicated to go into here for this article.
From this Collierville Tunnel Tap GIVAD back out to Highway 4 and up four miles to the Arnold WWTP where they collect and treat the wastewater for a portion of the Arnold area.
The next stop is up 35 miles up Highway 4 to Spicer Reservoir where the Spicer Reservoir hydroelectric powerhouse is located at the base of the dam.   This is another portion of the North Fork system that is owned by CCWD and operated and maintained by NCPA.   Besides the powerhouse, the dams, lakes, recreation areas at Spicer, Union, and Utica Reservoirs have a complicated ownership assignment and numerous water rights holders all who claim to own some or all the water rights which can lead to many fights over who owns what water.
From here GIVAD 47 miles back down Highway 4 to Avery and then north on the narrow and winding Sheep Ranch Road to the small community of Sheep Ranch to the WTP located there.   This is a rather small system that gets its primary source of water from White Pines Lake in the Arnold area.   Again, this plant requires an operator to come each day to check operations, do water tests, and log data.
After this tour, GIVAD and drive 14 miles north on Sheep Ranch Road and Railroad Flat Road to Wilseyville WWTP.   This is a small community WWTP that will, hopefully, be replaced with a holding tank and pump station to pump the untreated sewage to the nearby WWTP at West Point.   But until that occurs, this is an antiquated plant that needs daily attention.   The next stop is two miles further to West Point WWTP.   This plant was replaced a few years ago with a new state-of-the-art-treatment plant capable of handling the additional load from Wilseyville WWTP which we hope to get a grant for in the near future.
The next stop is only a mile away at the West Point WTP.   This plant was also recently replaced with a new plant funded by the state due to the disadvantaged community grant program.   There are a number of future projects still to be done in the West Point area, but this new plant has helped immensely.    Since the West Point and Wilseyville communities are considered to be disadvantaged communities, CCWD is doing all it can to apply and qualify for disadvantaged funding grants (actually, it is called a loan forgiveness funding).
Following this tour, GIVAD and go 40 miles west down Highways 26 and 12 to the Wallace Community Services District.   We were recently asked by the Wallace community to take over the water and wastewater operations that service this community.   This is the only ground water system that CCWD has.   Fortunately, both of the plants for this community are in the same area and can be serviced at the same time, with the requirement that the operations and tests for both systems are different.
The next system is a small community wastewater leach field operation off of Southworth Road which is five miles away.   Like the Indian Rock system outside of Murphys, there is not much to see above ground, but it does require a daily visit to check that it is operating okay and to make the log entries and to take samples for testing.     
After this system, the next stop is 11 miles at the New Hogan WWTP which is located east of the La Contenta golf community and north of New Hogan reservoir.   This is a fairly complicated complex requiring a lot of labor and monitoring.   The wastewater is treated to drinking water quality and then this treated wastewater is stored on site and eventually pumped to the La Contenta Golf Course to be sprayed on the greens after hours.
Just three miles further is the hydroelectric New Hogan Powerhouse.   While CCWD owns this powerhouse, it is operated and maintained by the Modesto Irrigation District which pays CCWD for the power generated.   The water in the reservoir is essentially owned by the Corps of Engineers.   CCWD has the rights for the water for the Jenny Lind WTP which is one mile below the dam on the Calaveras River.   Let it be noted that when the reservoir is at “minimum pool” all water releases cease except for CCWD drinking water and for minimum fish flows in the river.
And, finally, the trip back to headquarters is 14 miles.   We have gone about 265 miles with minimal backtracking and much of the routes on narrow mountainous and winding roads.   If we assume that it would take a minimum of 30 minutes at each tour location which includes opening and closing gates (often twice at each location), accessing locked buildings, introducing yourself to the lead operators, and walking around the plant sight, a 30 minute timeframe would be optimistic.   I doubt that this tour could be completed in two days, but it might if you were to push yourself hard, but I suspect that it would take three days.
As you can see, CCWD is a very large and complex system and, yet, we have only 67 employees (48 in operations and 19 in the office for finance, engineering and technical services).   A district this large requires a lot of trucks, heavy equipment, tools and support and testing gear.   The field employees are always moving around to cover all of the operations and emergencies.   There are 288 miles of water pipe, 125 miles of collection pipe, numerous water storage tanks, intake pumps, sewage lift stations and pumps, hundreds of fire hydrants, and myriads of other apparatti that you will not see on this tour.   Besides operations, the staff is involved in billing and collections, administering the finances, planning and submitting applications, addressing the many legal issues, addressing water rights issues, participating in numerous associations and organizations that are necessary even when it doesn’t appear to be necessary, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera…
To pay for all this CCWD has only 12,700 water customers, 4620 wastewater customers to pay for all of this.   Additionally, CCWD receives some county property tax revenue (which has gone down since the recession of 2008 and each year since), hydroelectric revenue, and a number of minor revenue sources to pay for all this.   The majority of the property tax and hydroelectric revenues go to support the O&M costs of CCWD.   CCWD has done a good job of controlling the budget and maintaining reserves needed for most of its needs.   The main exception to this is the reserves needed for Capital Improvement Projects, especially replacement CIP reserves.   Since the financial crisis of 2008, all CCWD replacement CIP reserves had been exhausted and much had been deferred until it became unmanageable, thus the need for the massive monthly price hikes of last year, all of which will be put toward replacement CIP projects.
Thank you for taking this tour with me, and please forgive me for throwing in some comments at the end.   I don’t think most people realize how vast CCWD is.   It is my hope that this will help people understand.
Dennis Dooley, CCWD Director, District 4