Aug/Sep 2004 - Volume 3, Issue 5

Water Supply Critical Infrastructure:
Securing Elgin's Riverside Water Treatment Plant

The following interview with Kyla Jacobsen took place on August 27, 2004. The transcript has been edited for publication.

What is your role here at the Elgin Riverside Water Treatment Facility?

I am the chief chemist in charge of water quality. I'm a water quality engineer. My bachelor's degree is in chemistry and physiology (Southern Illinois University). My two master's degrees are in biochemistry (Northern Illinois University) and environmental engineering (Illinois Institute of Technology). I've worked here almost 20 years. I love what I do. I love all the technology involved with water treatment, including chemistry, engineering and hydraulics.

What is the source of water today for the 94,000+ residents of the City of Elgin, Illinois?

Elgin residents receive approximately 94 percent of their water from the Fox River and 6 percent from deep wells. Beginning in the 1880s, the City of Elgin began pumping ‘pristine' river water directly to customers' homes via water mains made from wood planks. Following waterborne disease outbreaks from polluted river water in the early 1900s, the City decided to drill deep wells to a depth of 2,000 feet, tapping the groundwater in the Cambrian-Ordovician Aquifer. Between 1904 and the mid-1970s, the City drilled a total of 11 deep wells. Over time, a growing number of communities in northern Illinois also tapped into this aquifer, causing a drop in the water table and a rise in electrical costs to pump the water to the surface. Once again, Elgin officials began exploring for alternate sources of raw water, including buying water from the City of Chicago, which uses Lake Michigan as its raw source. The City decided to return to the Fox River as its water source and built the Riverside Water Treatment Plant in 1982 to process the water. In 1999, Riverside doubled its capacity. The deep wells remain available for our use. We keep them exercised in case we need to use them in an emergency. This provides us with redundant systems-well water and river water.

How do you make sure the water is fit to use?

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) classifies our sources as ‘vulnerable' because we are a surface water system. As a result, EPA requires us to have a complex system of water treatment, a contingency plan, more rigorous testing, and other requirements that are built into our permit. Every two hours (at a minimum), 24 hours/day, we test the water in the river, each treatment basin, and the finished water. If we have special issues, we may take samples more frequently to make needed adjustments to our treatment process. If we have suspicion that something is going on in the river, we may go upstream to take samples. We also test the distribution system (the pipes that take the water to consumers) by taking at least 100 samples each month (approximately 20 samples at a time) from faucets in the community. We bring the samples back to the facility to subject them to a battery of tests. We do in-house microbiology testing on all of the samples every day. We are an EPA-certified laboratory and have to do quality control and performance evaluation testing and studies through the EPA to maintain our certification. We don't send bacteriology tests out to other laboratories. We may send out some of our organics and inorganics (pesticides and herbicides) to the state laboratory for processing (for tests we do not perform regularly). We've never found any pesticides or herbicides in our water.

The City of Aurora (IL) officials issued a boil water order in spring 2004 because of elevated fecal-coliform levels in the water entering the treatment facility. Was the Elgin water similarly affected?

We detected elevated levels of fecal coliforms here at our water treatment plant and responded to them with chlorination. It was barely a blip on our chlorine chart. We know what to monitor for and how to respond. The fecal-coliform test is a 24-hour test, which means we don't have results until 24 hours after we test for fecal coliforms. But there are other indicator tests that we run in our plant, which provide us with instantaneous results that tell us how to respond.

Can you describe an indicator test that can provide more timely results on water quality?

Yes. "Chlorine demand" is an indicator of water quality. The water has a certain demand for chlorine to disinfect the water. We squelch that demand to obtain the level of disinfection we want. A decrease in residual level of chlorine means that the demand for chlorine is going up. So we add more chlorine to get the residual back up. We were watching the chlorine residual decrease during that period in spring. The chlorine residual made a perfect drop and corresponding rise following adding more chlorine. We said, "There's something going on in the river," but since we couldn't immediately determine what was going on, we responded to the drop in chlorine residual by increasing our chlorine. We were able to respond correctly to the incident without yet knowing its cause. The chlorine demand indicator and fecal-coliform testing provide us with redundancy in our testing systems.

How is river water treated at your plant to make it safe for drinking?

Four pumps draw river water through an intake structure, which is about 10 feet below the level of the river, into a wet well. All water is drawn through a screen to remove large debris, fish, and leaves. A traveling bar moves slowly across the screen to scrape the screen so that it is free of debris. The water is then pumped to two large transmission mains. One main goes to four basins that were part of the original plant design and the other goes to the basins that were part of the 1999 expansion. We have two separate treatment trains, which provide us with redundancy for maintenance and emergencies.

What is a treatment train?

A treatment train is a flow system through which water passes as it is being treated. All you can see above ground are the basins. We can shut down one treatment train and still make water. The two treatment trains run in parallel, not in series. In the presedimentation basin, we add alum as our primary coagulant to remove turbidity, and powder-activated carbon as our first line of defense against organic contaminants (which we don't find very often in the Fox River), and taste and odor reduction because of algae in the river. The next basins, called the primary basins, are our softening basins. We lime-soften the water in Elgin with lime calcium oxide ("quick pebble lime") that is mined from alongside the Mississippi River Basin. We remove about 75 percent of the total hardness. Our secondary basins provide for secondary softening to remove any carry-over turbidity from the primary basins. Then the water comes into the building to the filters. We have eight granular-activated carbon-capped filters. Gravity causes the water to feed down through the filters. From there, the water goes to the reservoirs, which is our chlorine contact chamber-that is where we do our chlorination.

How has the water plant prepared for emergencies since 9/11?

In 1982, the EPA required us, as part of our permit, to develop a contingency plan in the event of a catastrophe on the river. We have done extensive contacting of emergency agencies such as the fire and police departments to the north of us. We obtain copies of all the industrial permits from industries north. We also contact them in the event they have an accidental discharge into a tributary of the Fox River. We have an extensive book containing letters we've sent to many agencies and organizations to advise them that we're the water utility and use the Fox River as our drinking water source. If they become aware of an emergency that may affect the river water, we advise them of the need to notify us. We have someone here to receive emergency calls 365 days/year, 24 hours/day. We're also tied into police communications and dispatch, which will notify us if they receive a call.

After 9/11, EPA required us to hire a consultant to perform a vulnerability assessment of our facility. The consultant and the EPA strongly suggested that we implement certain items to further reduce our vulnerability to terrorist attack. For example, the black fence and locked gate surrounding the building is new. We have always had a fence that surrounded the basins. But now the whole facility is fenced and secured. We have also installed many video cameras for continuous surveillance and are evaluating purchase of a back-up generator to provide additional power reserve even though we draw our power from two separate substations.

Has your facility ever experienced a water quality issue?

No. We've never had one. We've never had a water boil order in Elgin. We talk about potential scenarios and have drills. We get police and fire involved with our drills when we are dealing with hazardous materials. We are concerned about many issues, such as water quality, water main breaks, and guarding the chemicals at our plant.

What if your plant was hit by a tornado? How would you respond?

It would depend on what the tornado took out. All of our piping is underground so it's protected. The basins are twenty feet deep, so they're not going anywhere. We might lose top structures, such as one of our reservoirs, but the reservoirs can be valved off. If we lost pressure in the system, different issues arise. If we don't lose pressure, we could go onto a water conservation plan asking Elgin residents to conserve. We do have a small treatment plant on the west side of Elgin associated with the wells there that we could make clean water if that plant had not been hit. Most important, we have reserves of water-probably a day's worth available between the reservoirs, the overhead tanks, and other storage areas.

Impact of Aurora Water Boil Order on Local Renal Dialysis Units

By Margaret O'Leary, M.D.

The following interview with Ms. Janice Magnuson and Mr. Steve E. Smith took place on Friday, September 4, 2004. The transcript has been edited and approved by the interviewees for publication.

Ms. Magnuson and Mr. Smith, please describe your roles in the renal dialysis unit.

Magnuson: I am a certified nephrology nurse (since 1988) and have been a dialysis unit manager most of that time. I've been with Fox Valley Dialysis (Aurora, Illinois) and Tri-Cities Dialysis (Geneva, Illinois) and with Dr. Harry Rubenstein (their medical director) since the units opened.

Smith: I am the lead biomedical technician and technical manager for operations for Fox Valley Dialysis and Tri-Cities Dialysis units. I have approximately 23 years of experience in the dialysis field and long-standing experience with water treatment.

Approximately how many patients do you dialyze in your units?

Magnuson: In February 2004, we had approximately 170 patients and 60 staff members. Approximately 475,000 patients in the U.S. depend on renal dialysis. There are 171 dialysis units of varying size in Illinois. We are part of The Renal Network, ESRD 9/10 (see: http://www.therenalnetwork.org/index.html).

Mr. Smith, what is the water treatment process for the dialysis unit?

At Fox Valley Dialysis, we analyze incoming Aurora municipal water, which is a combination of Fox River water and well water. Sometimes city water conditions change. For example, the water department may blend in more river than well water, which could affect our dialysis unit water. That said, we monitor daily incoming water temperature and perform a temperature blend of hot and cold water to maintain the temperature at 78 degrees Fahrenheit. We also monitor water pressure and the reverse osmosis (R/O) equipment, which consists of seven membranes (filters). The R/O equipment rejects more than 50 percent of the incoming water, meaning that of sixteen gallons/minute coming in, only seven gallons of pure water goes into a holding tank that circulates throughout the dialysis unit. My job is to make sure that the water circulating in the dialysis unit-the "product water"-is pure.

We soften our water and remove chlorine or chloramines added to the water by the municipal water treatment plant. We perform chlorine checks four times each day. We also ultrafilter the water as it enters each dialysis machine. Our onsite technicians have a procedure they perform to double check the water system at each dialysis machine. We make sure that all of our quality parameters are within the safety range. We are very safety conscious.

How did you first learn about Aurora's Boil Order on February 5, 2004?

Magnuson: I was on my way home from work Friday evening when I received a phone call from a dialysis technician at the Acute Dialysis Services at Rush Copley Hospital in Aurora. She said that hospital staff were tagging all of the sinks with "do-not-use" signs because the City of Aurora had issued a water boil order due to "total coliforms" tests showing positive in 5% of city test sites. We immediately discontinued dialysis treatments on patients at the Fox Valley Dialysis unit and Acute Dialysis Services at Rush Copley Hospital, whose source of incoming water is the Aurora Water Treatment plant which takes its supply from the Fox River and wells. I instructed our staff to immediately wash their hands with bottled water and antibacterial soap. Then I phoned Harry Rubenstein, M.D., medical director of the dialysis units and Steve Smith, our biomedical technician.

Smith: I immediately drew "pre-disinfect" water culture samples for colony forming units (cfu/ml) to assess for the presence of bacteria in incoming tap water and sample sites from all points throughout the water loop system at Fox Valley Dialysis. I also performed an LAL endotoxin test on the Reverse/Osmosis (R/O) equipment. All dialysis machines at Acute Dialysis Services at Rush Copley Hospital were similarly tested. Three sources of "cfu" tests were performed. We sent culture samples to ESRD Laboratory (our vendor) and samples to Rush Copley Hospital Laboratory and notified their infection control nurse. I also placed a paddle sample in an incubator in my office at Fox Valley Dialysis. We were aggressive in determining what we were dealing with. The City of Aurora had only a 5% positive rate in their city test sites. We didn't know if we were affected or not, but we didn't take any chances.

On Saturday morning, we performed an end-to-end disinfection on the water treatment system, beginning with the R/O equipment, followed by flushing out the pretreatment components, which include our softener, carbon tanks, and the bicarbonate tank loop. I also changed the filters. Then I drew post-disinfect water culture samples from all of the same sites for which I had drawn the original water culture samples. As it turned out, we did not have bacteria in the pre-disinfect samples. The LAL endotoxin test was negative. The performance of the R/O equipment met all quality standards published by the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (AAMI) (see: http://www.aami.org/.)

The bottom line was that we had no problems, but we were being very proactive. We also contacted our water treatment vendor Saturday to verify that the R/O equipment would indeed remove bacteria that might come to our building. They confirmed that the membranes inside the R/O would remove such bacteria. We also had contacts in the dialysis profession with people who had experience with water problems. I also contacted the company that manufactures the membranes that go into the R/O equipment and was assured by the representative that the membranes would prevent bacteria from passing through. Our water treatment does purify the water by taking out bacteria. We felt much more comfortable but we wanted to be triple sure. At that point we monitored our system with cultures each week for a month. All cultures had no growth. We performed the same procedures for our portable R/O equipment used by our Acute Dialysis Services team.

Magnuson: It is not an easy task to move patients from one dialysis unit to another. Emergency planning procedures guided our efforts to move our Fox Valley Dialysis patients from Aurora to Tri-Cities Dialysis in Geneva. Sometimes patients have transportation issues or don't have a phone. We were able to contact our patients using an emergency list previously created for this purpose and carefully documented in their charts that we had contacted them. We were ready to rent a bus to pick up the patients at the Fox Valley Dialysis unit and transport them to our Tri-Cities Dialysis unit. Fortunately, we didn't have to go to that extent. We needed to transfer staff and additional dialysis machines and supplies from one unit to the other. Steve made sure that the Tri-Cities Dialysis water treatment system could handle the demand of additional patients, which it could.

Smith: We also were prepared to bring in a water tanker from Janesville, Wisconsin, to provide water to our Fox River Dialysis unit if the boil order was going to be prolonged. We planned to run this water through our de-ionizing tanks to fill up our break tanks and loop systems and through our ultrafiltration systems to the patients. We also have a large back up generator powered with natural gas in case we ever lose power. We can run it as long as needed.

Did you interact with the Aurora Water Treatment Department and Kane County Public Health Department?

Smith: It was difficult to obtain information from the City of Aurora because staff were not only inundated with calls, but did not yet have new information. They said they had 5% positive tests throughout the city. No one was very sure whether or not the water causing the tests to be positive in sites in Aurora reached our particular location. There was a lot of uncertainty. But we treated the incident as if it were real. You can never guess on these things.

Magnuson: We send a letter every year to the water department in Aurora letting them know that we have a dialysis unit and request that they notify us if anything abnormal occurs. We made several calls with them to receive information. On Saturday morning, we made the decision to move all of our Fox Valley Dialysis patients to the Tri-Cities Dialysis unit in Geneva for dialysis. The City of Geneva water comes solely from deep wells; no water from the Fox River is used. We continued to dialyze the Fox Valley Dialysis patients at our Geneva location until February 9, 2004, when all water cultures came back negative for bacterial growth.

We talked to several people at the Kane County Public Health Department and as soon as we knew who to call we were on the phone to them a lot. On Saturday, I spoke with one official who said that the R/O equipment would not remove bacteria. By that time, we had already made the decision to move all of our Fox Valley Dialysis patients to our Tri-Cities Dialysis facility. We also were waiting for confirmation about the R/O equipment's ability to remove bacteria from water from our own water vendor source. If I had to do it again, I would still err on the side of caution and move all patients to water that was known to be safe.

I contacted the Kane County Health Department several times. Between them and the City of Aurora staff, I was on the phone frequently. Of course, we wanted to move our patients back home as soon as possible because it was a travel issue for many of them. We also wanted to make sure that everyone was adequately dialyzed. It was a tough time for a week.

What would you have done if you had only one dialysis unit - the one in Aurora?

Magnuson: We would look for other units. It has been done before. For example, a past president of the National Renal Administrators Association (see: http://www.nraa.org/) in Nebraska rented a bus for a week to move patients two hours away to another renal dialysis unit when her own unit had to be closed down because of problems with hemolysis [destruction of red blood cells]. Nurses accompanied the patients. That is exactly what I would have done with our patients. I would get other units to take my patients.

Do you have a mutual aid agreement with other renal dialysis units?

Magnuson: We're working on one. We don't already have one because we have Tri-Cities Dialysis as a back up. We do have a lot of units with whom we mentor. If I picked up the phone right now to another dialysis unit to ask if they would be able to take some patients, there would be no problem. There have never been any problems getting help from other units. The goal is to get the patients dialyzed.

Is there anything you would like to add?

Smith: I've put together a "Water Treatment Awareness for Dialysis" summary that may be helpful to other persons interested in renal dialysis unit emergency preparedness. (See accompanying box.)

Police Chief Dial to Chair "Indicators for Preparedness" Task Force

David E. Dial, Police Chief, City of Naperville, Illinois will chair the new SEMP task group charged with developing a framework which can be used to assess and improve disaster preparedness of a community for multi-hazards. Chief Dial received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Law Enforcement and Administration from San Jose State in 1967, and began his law enforcement career in January of that same year with the Milpitas, California Police Department. After graduating from college, he took a two-year military leave of absence from the department and served for one year as a military intelligence officer in Vietnam, earning three bronze stars. After serving in Vietnam, he returned to the Milpitas, California Police Department where he served as a traffic officer and a patrol officer until 1973.

He then joined the Lakewood, Colorado Police Department and furthered his formal education, earning a Master's Degree in Public Administration from the University of Colorado. During the next 17 years, he rose through the ranks of the Lakewood, Colorado Police Department and served for five years as the assistant chief of police. During that time, he also attended and graduated from the FBI National Academy and the Police Executive Research Forum's Senior Management Institute for Police.

In 1990, he was appointed as chief in the Naperville, Illinois Police Department as a result of a national search and test conducted by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Chief Dial is especially committed to continually involving the members of the community in the operations of the police department.

SEMP Goes to Springfield, Illinois Dr. Margaret O'Leary, SEMP director, traveled to Springfield (IL) on 9/18/04 to share the SEMP experience with members of the Illinois News Broadcasters Association (INBA), which this year is celebrating its 50-year anniversary of service to broadcast journalists (http://www.inba.net) O'Leary shared the dais with Mr. Ray Cooke, Springfield's public health director. Cooke described the clinical signs and pathogenesis of likely bioterrorist pathogens while O'Leary discussed the need for citizen-communities to improve levels of community disaster preparedness. The audience and speakers engaged in spirited discussion about whether citizens "panic" following disaster (they don't), and the dilemma of detecting a bioterrorist attack when presenting symptoms mimic the flu.

The SEMP logo consists of five colors. These are the colors associated with the five threat conditions, progressing from green (the lowest threat condition), on to blue, yellow, orange and, finally, red (the highest threat condition). The radiating arcs symbolize the expansion of an epidemic brought about by a terrorist attack. Our goal, through awareness, education and organization, is to prevent the spread of an epidemic and to keep everyone safely in the green. Securitas is Published by: Editor: Margaret O'Leary Layout Editor: Kris Schroeder