Smart Sewers
MSD’s award-winning Smart Sewer system uses real-time monitoring, hydraulic modeling, and remote controls to reduce sewer overflows, optimize sewer operations, and protect local waterways.
Our smart sewer system has helped MSD:
- Reduce CSOs by about half a billion gallons a year at four real-time control facilities located at CSO outfalls
- Prevent the discharge of 1.4 million gallons of sewer overflows in a single day by routing flow to a treatment facility 16 miles away.
- Avoid 178 million gallons of overflow during a single rain storm through the use of remote system controls like gates.
MSD's SMART SEWER SYSTEM
MSD's smart sewers use more than 700 remote sensors inside sewer pipes and at wet weather facilities, pump stations and treatment plants to collect data on water levels, flow, water quality, etc. In addition, MSD uses rain gages and stream gages to collect additional data.
This data is fed into a SCADA computer system, which can actively control MSD's collection system in real time to remotely operate system controls such as gates, valves, and pumps.
Wet Weather
During rain storms, these remote system controls can help store the wastewater inside an interceptor sewer, at a CSO outfall, or inside a CSO storage tank until there is additional capacity in downstream sewers to take the flow to a treatment plant. It can also divert flows to a high-rate treatment (HRT) facility within the collection system.
This helps keep sewage in the pipes and out of our waterways. And smart sewers cost about $0.01/gallon of overflow volume reduced, as compared to about $0.23/gallon for green stormwater controls and about $0.40/gallon for gray solutions such as larger pipes and storage tanks.
Dry Weather
During dry weather, MSD uses the information to identify uncharacteristic behavior in the sewer system, such as dry weather overflows or cave ins, allowing MSD crews to address the issue quickly.
WHAT'S NEXT?
MSD has deployed its smart sewers across our service area and is now advancing the construction of dynamic underflow controls (DUCs) at targeted overflow locations. The addition of these operable gates will enable even more flow to be intercepted and stored inside existing sewers or sewer infrastructure during the rain event and then taken to a treatment plant when capacity is available in downstream pipes.
