Utility Manager's Alternative Sewer Tool
The tool provides effective strategies for local conditions, circumstances, terrain, and demographics – it includes advantages and disadvantages to each option.
We are excited to announce the release of our new Wastewater Collection Alternatives Tool for utility managers, engineers, operators, leaders, and board members! For many years gravity wastewater collection systems were considered the only way to collect and move wastewater to the treatment and disposal facilities. Until relatively recently, every regulatory body primarily addressed gravity sewer and no other alternatives. Technical documents and reference manuals provided guidance primarily for gravity sewer and not alternatives.Over the last year, we have been tirelessly working to improve our services and we believe that the Wastewater Collection Alternatives Tool will help you choose the best collection system for your utility.
So how can the tool help you? Inflow and infiltration is a major problem for gravity sewers in coastal areas and low-lying areas prone to flooding. The tool will help users to identify which sewer option is best for your application.
- Gravity Sewers
- Grinder/Low-Pressure
- Vacuum Systems, or
- Decentralized/Onsite Systems
You can download the tool by clicking on the graphic above or clicking here.
The tool primarily addresses alternatives to gravity sewers subject to king tides, sea level rise, flooding, tropical storms, high inflow & infiltration (I&I), high groundwater, etc. The tool is applicable to new construction and retrofits.
Recent legislative and regulatory efforts focuses on sewage spills and gravity surcharge issues with fines for utilities.
The tool provides effective strategies for local conditions, circumstances, terrain, and demographics – it includes advantages and disadvantages to each option. The tool also provides discussion of relative costs, ongoing operations, and life cycle cost for comparison in a general sense for decision-making free of biases.
The current version of the tool is a beta version and for demonstration purposes only. While the information in the tool is accurate it is not comprehensive. The tool will be upgraded frequently until being officially released for use. We are releasing this version to seek continued input from potential users and especially those utilities that have already performed the evaluation of alternative systems and selected them over traditional gravity sewer.
We invite you to review the tool and provide feedback – we are also soliciting utilities to submit case studies of collection alternatives. Case studies should generally follow an outline that identifies the project area, discusses initial issues and concerns, describes the decision matrix or analysis performed for the various alternatives, describes the present worth analysis or other cost evaluations, describes the selected alternative and provides information on the outcome of the project or other post construction analysis. The case studies can be provided to Florida Rural Water at frwa@frwa.net. And questions can be answered by calling 850.668.2746.