Plan proposed to help Logan City conserve water
A 5-year water conservation plan proposed Tuesday night at a Logan City Council meeting is likely to commission assistance from USU researchers hoping to receive funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
Logan City Public Works director Mark Nielsen and assistant city engineer Lance Houser informed council members of their plans to reduce the 28 percent of water that is lost in the city’s system every year due to leaks, main breaks and other, unaccounted for water.
“In 1992 the city was using on the average 400 gallons per capita, per day – extremely high,” Houser said. “In the summers of 2003 and 2004 our peak demands nearly exceeded our ability to deliver water, we were maxed out.”
Citing the renewed draft of the water conservation plan, he said those peak demands were at 36 million gallons per day for the entire city. For 2009 and 2010 those demands have been reduced to 26 million gallons per day.
Current per-person usage is down to 95 gallons per day, Houser said, which is far below the state-mandated level of 140 gallons per day. The problem now is not with usage but with loss.
“The Public Works Department has recognized water conservation to be very important,” the plan states, “not only for environmental reasons, but for economic reasons.”
USU applied economics professor Arthur Caplan, associate professor Joanna Endter-Wada from the environment and society department and assistant professor David Rosenberg of the civil and environmental engineering department have applied for an NSF grant and are planning to work with Logan City to help benefit the community.
Rosenberg said faculty and student researchers from other departments have been involved with the project as well.
“Our specific proposal is a large multi-year study that would look at what would encourage and motivate residential households to conserve water,” Rosenberg said. “Leakage within a household can be a very significant source of water use in a house.”
Councilmember Jay Monson said he remembered a few years ago, USU students visited a bunch of residential, commercial and industrial locations to conduct water audits for free. He said they were very helpful in diagnosing ways to reduce water loss.
Houser said the program was advertised and at least 100 residences took advantage of it. USU and Logan City have worked with each other consistently throughout the years on many issues, including water conservation.
“We turned in what I feel is a really good proposal, we feel we’re definitely very competitive, but I don’t even know how many proposals NSF receives for this particular call,” Rosenberg said. “It would open up phenomenal opportunities.”
A lot of the project budget would be set aside for personnel that would consist of a large number of undergraduate researchers who would be hired for summer work to contact household members, collect and enter data, and handle research logistics. He said graduate students would also be incorporated for the project.
Rosenberg said NSF looks for projects like this that give students a wonderful opportunity to work with the city, conduct research, get “real life” experience and ultimately look at water conservation from an interdisciplinary perspective.
“The thing that I really try to emphasize to my students is their most important skill is critical thinking,” Rosenberg said. “You get thrust into a very complex, dynamic environment and you have to really come up with new approaches and innovative thoughts to move forward.”
Nielsen said in the past university participants only conducted water audits on landscaping. This time they are going to work with new methods to see what works and what does not.
He said there are 13 proposed ideas university researchers are going to test including adding more information to water bills, increasing child education, allowing citizen-participants to enter data via the Internet and even three different water saving contests.
“They’ve done some work with us in the past, which was mainly educating people as to the efficiency of their sprinkler systems,” Nielsen said. “This is a much more involved and long-term study than what they’ve done before.”
Houser said USU recently dug a water-well as part of the many self-sustaining projects the university has begun to implement. Prior to that, a much larger portion of university water came through city pipes and was purchased at a wholesale rate.
According to the water conservation plan, the Logan population increased by 30 percent between 1990 and 2000 and by 2005 was around 47,000. Estimates prepared by the city for 2010 are over 50,000. University enrollment has also increased to 16,472 students in 2010.
“Water, at the current growth rates, we’re good out to about 2025,” Houser said. “We have another well we’re working on, so that should get us out to the 2035 period, but at that point we need to be looking at some additional water supplies.”
City Council meets again on Tuesday, March 15, and will vote to either approve or deny the water conservation plan. Houser said the plan should reduce the 28 percent system-loss to around 18 percent.
“The more the loss is reduced, the harder it gets to find ways to reduce it further,” Houser said.
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu