By Sebastian Kanally, Times Chronicle
Oliver’s system for controlling its water and wastewater systems is functional, but needs improvement to meet modern standards, says an independent report.
Oliver received a report by MPE, a division of Englobe, on the state of its Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system used in controlling the operations of its water and wastewater systems.
The SCADA system is a critical piece of infrastructure and is used daily to operate the water and wastewater systems for the town.
Nick Sawatzky, automation controls project manager, for MPE explained that their assessment looked at Oliver’s control system assessment.
This means “all the infrastructure that is used to move water and wastewater around the town and surrounding regions, seeing what state it’s all in and what upgrades we would recommend ensuring the reliability of the system going forward.”
The report provided 10 recommendations for the town of Oliver to improve its system.
The first recommendation deals with upgrading the SCADA application that the town currently uses because it does not meet industry standards. This has already been approved and is underway by the town. This comes at a price of $85,658.
The second major project that MPE recommended was to upgrade old programable logic controller (PLC) hardware. “PLC’s are the controllers at each of these sites that make decisions to operate the equipment”.
Sawatzky further explained that all of the current ones that the town is using were discontinued years ago and you can’t get them off the shelf anymore. Replacing all these PLC’s would come in at a cost of $226,500.
Another high-ticket item recommended was the removal of a public works data concentrator PLC. This item is currently operating within the system by collecting the data from all the PLC’s, then makes the data available to the SCADA system.
This was identified as a redundancy, and removing this system would simplify the transfer of data by allowing the SCADA system to directly access each PLC. Removal of this would cost the town $48,000
Other recommendations included having spare parts for the system, having a control system standard specification, and upgrading radio systems.
All the recommendations provided by MPE were further broken down into suggested budget allocations for the next 10 years and equal $738,841.
These projects were all given a risk score between low, medium, high and extreme. They were also given classifications referring to them as a “major project” to be undertaken, such as replacing the SCADA application, or a “nice to have” upgrade such as having spare parts or control system maintenance.
