Utility Excellence Awards

Risk Taking - Implementation of innovative technologies

CWWA offers to its Utility Members the Implementation of Innovative Technologies Award. The Award honours outstanding achievements in the deployment and successful implementation of innovative technologies in its application year.

Did your utility take on projects that embrace new and advanced technology while leading the field in delivering real and tangible benefits?
Does your utility have projects that support significant organizational improvements or changes that involve the use of technology to deliver innovative new services?
Is your utility an early adopter of leading-edge environmental technologies or did this minimize the impact on the environment?
What risks has your utility taken and how did you overcome them?

Once you've voted for the Risk Taking Category, be sure to vote for the best project in Community Outreach.

	Large Utilities (greater than 150,000)
	City of Edmonton - Kennedale Storm Basin The Kennedale storm basin covers a significant portion of Edmonton’s storm system and as a result, even relatively small storm events deliver high volumes of runoff and pollutants. To mitigate the effect of these pollutants, the City of Edmonton has constructed an artificial wetland capable of treating various pollutants found in stormwater. Previously, all of Edmonton’s stormwater management facilities had been built primarily for flood prevention. More

	City of Ottawa - Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment The City of Ottawa has been a leader in the application of QMRA for optimizing drinking water treatment and enhancing water safety. QMRA (Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment) is a newly developed tool that evaluates the microbial risk in an individual water system in terms of annual risk of illness for the population. More

	City of Ottawa - Woodroffe Acoustic Fiber Installation On January 14, 2011, Ottawa experienced a massive watermain failure impacting approximately 80,000 residents. This was the second recorded failure along that line but this failure was approximately 500 m north. The ultimate renewal strategy included replacing 1 km of main (incorporated the most deteriorated sections), the installation of Acoustic Fiber Optic (AFO) Cable (PURE Technologies) and transient monitoring along the single feed length (5.1 km). More

	Halifax Water - Central DMA/PMA: Flow Modulated Pressure Control Halifax Water adopted the AWWA/IWA Water Loss Methodology in 2000. Since that time, Halifax Water has reduced its Infrastructure Leakage Index (ILI) from 9.0 to 3.0, resulting in a reduction in system inputs from168 to 130 million litres per day. More View PowerPoint

	Metro Vancouver - Seymour-Capilano Filtration Plant The Seymour-Capilano Filtration Plant (SCFP) is a leading-edge treatment facility that provides high quality drinking water to Metro Vancouver residents within its service area. The plant is the largest filtration plant in Canada with a design capacity of 1.8 billion litres of water per day and incorporates the largest ultra-violet light disinfection system in the world. More Watch the video

	Metro Vancouver - Co-Digestion Pilot Project The Annacis Island Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) is the largest secondary treatment plant in British Columbia and serves a population of more than 1 million residents. A $2.6 million co-digestion full-scale pilot project has been built at this plant to enable the direct feed of high-strength organic wastes along with sludge, settled from sewage treatment facilities, into the existing anaerobic digesters to generate biogas and increase energy production at the WWTP. The project was completed in April 2011 and is now fully operational. More Download the PowerPoint

	Ontario Clean Water Agency - New Technology to Boost Energy Efficiency In early 2011, the Ontario Clean Water Agency (OCWA) saw an opportunity to make a difference in a Northern Ontario community. The OCWA-operated wastewater treatment plant in the Township of Black River-Matheson was facing some challenges. It was not working at its maximum capacity – operating at higher than normal costs and the oxygen transfer efficiency of the installed course bubble aeration system was relatively low. With the aeration system upgrade, Black River-Matheson was able to convert the wastewater treatment plant into an energy-efficient one. More

	Regional Municipality of Durham - Polybutylene Water Service main stop locates using a CCTV Camera In 2009, the Region of Durham received $9,980,000 from the Infrastructure Stimulus Fund (ISF) for the replacement of 2,000 polybutylene connections. In order to comply with the funding time constraints, a faster method to find these main stops was needed. The Region of Durham currently examines sanitary sewers and sewer laterals, and inspects water reservoirs with CCTV cameras, which sparked the interest in examining a watermain with the same technology More

	Windsor Utilities Commission - SCADA Innovation The Windsor Water Treatment Complex is one of the most technologically advanced in Canada, thanks to recent innovative Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) and wireless technology investments. The current SCADA infrastructure (similar to most SCADA architecture installations in various industries) was at the end of its useful life and vulnerable to single points of failure. For example, if the system and had lost an input/output (I/O), such as the one running the chlorine dosing pumps, the SCADA system would fail to meet the regulatory requirement and result in an adverse water quality incident. More

Medium Utilities (between 10,000 and 150,000)

City of Barrie - Implementation of New Technologies

Barrie is a medium sized Ontario city (current population – 140,000, 1990 population – 50,000) which has experienced considerable growth over the last decade or more (including being cited as the fastest growing city in Canada in 2 of those years). Modernization as well as preparation for ongoing growth pressures has been a key driver for the implementation of the technologies that have been launched in 2011.

City of Victoria - Steel Watermain Rehabilitation

The Steel Watermain Rehabilitation works included rehabilitation of over 6,670 m of 500 mm and 925 m of 600 mm steel water main constructed in the 1930’s and 1940’s. The project involved sliplining where the cross-section of the liner pipe is temporarily modified for insertion, as well as a traditional sliplining component. This is the largest known trenchless rehabilitation project for large diameter watermains in North America.

Small Utilities (below 10,000)

There were no entries for this category.

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