Project Overview
A groundwater aquifer is a main drinking water source for many around the world. This holds true for a region in western Ohio which houses their drinking water in one of these underground reservoirs. This aquifer stores 1.5 trillion gallons of groundwater and serves as the sole source of drinking water for 400,000 people. Groundwater in the region is extremely susceptible to contamination at the surface. For this reason, the municipality where the aquifer resides established a Multi-Jurisdictional Source Water Protection Program (SWPP). The goal of the SWPP is to protect and preserve the groundwater resources that supply the area’s drinking water. In response to recent changes made in Ohio including a much larger protection area, the municipality needed to expand the existing early warning monitoring well network.
In response to recent changes made in the Source Water Protection Program (SWPP) Ohio, T&M was hired to design and install an early detection system to monitor water levels in the expanded area and to protect drinking water wells from PFAS contaminants in the Region. T&M worked in three areas for the City: 1) City Well Field, 2) Fire Training Center, and 3) and Industrial park adjacent to a river. The system ensures that the hydraulic control from the interceptor wells is maintained to protect the aquifer. The system consists of (65) monitoring wells, each of which has a pressure transducer to measure real-time water levels in the aquifer. The transducer is installed within the water column and transmits the water level to a data logger mounted adjacent to the well casing. The data logger and transducer are powered by a 6-watt solar panel and transmits the water level data wirelessly to a cloud-based SCADA system. T&M also developed an innovative approach to transmit signals from subsurface well vaults. A wide band spread spectrum antenna that mounts within the well vault lid creates a low-profile antenna which can be driven over yet transmit the signal from within the vault to a nearby radio repeater. A web-based graphic user interface was also created to display the entire well system on a GIS aerial map to show real-time and historic water levels for each of the 65 wells in the network. If one of the (2) independent monitoring system transducers detects a water level outside of the specified range, the system will send an email and/or text message alarm to the municipality.
Source Water Protection is an environmental challenge that was successfully addressed with help from T&M’s Automation Team.
