C Factor—Patrick “Murf” Murphy

President, FWPCOA

There are estimates that 1,000 people are moving to Florida each day and its population will increase to nearly 26 million by 2030. By that time the state is projected to use 7.7 billion gallons of water per day, which is 1.3 billion gallons per day more than is currently being used.

If you aren’t locked in your home for fear of COVID or other things, then you’ve seen that the traffic has increased and new buildings are going up, and it seems like folks are just pouring in! One of the last figures I saw was that 60 percent are from other states and 40 percent are from other countries.

There is no denying that new facilities are going to be popping up everywhere, or at least existing facilities are going to require expansions and upgrades to facilitate compliant operations due to increased populations.

The process needed for a new facility, expansion, and/or upgrade can be a trying time for the operators, engineers, and contractors who will be designing and building the facility or doing the construction. Depending on the size and complexity of the work being done, parts of the process can push you to your wits end.

You need to find an engineering firm that will be able to perform the design, then feed them information about current data and existing plan sets if it’s an expansion or upgrade; if it’s a new facility, then information must be generated on what is going to effectively produce or treat the water in question, targeting parameters that need to be addressed. Usually, all of the operators will not be involved in many parts of the process, but they will be expected to operate what is built, and the wisest of engineers will at least question the operators at the beginning for their input.

Generally, the designs will come in at 30, 60, and 90 percent; the people that you are going to have reviewing these plan sets and the other documents (i.e., technical memos, feasibility reports, modeling reports, basis of design reports, etc.) should be forwardthinking, detail-oriented folks who are willing and able to invest time in the reviews. Hopefully, your initial 30 percent design submittal won’t be a paper-cutter plan set with some other utility’s name scattered through the entire document, and the plans show something resembling what was expected at the onset.

We are human, however, and mistakes aren’t necessarily mistakes unless you don’t have the foresight to realize how something is going to be problematic. It’s so easy to miss things when you’re flipping through 11x17 plan sets or scrolling through 200-page documents. The intent would be that by the time you see the 90 percent sets, there is so little that you would need to do, because at that point it’s going to be catapulted into the final design and anything not caught by that time is probably going to cause change orders to the work. All of this usually take one to two years (maybe more), unless it’s some minor project; then, construction can begin.

With the last expansion project at Plant City (I started there in mid-2003), the 90 percent designs had been completed, so there wasn’t much sense in me reviewing those plan sets because certain things were not going to get changed, as they were preparing to launch into the next steps. There was a lot of foresight put into the scope of work and there were going to be weekly progress meetings. This is usually unheard of now, since that means paying engineers and contractors who are involved in the project for their attendance. Some of our recent projects are more costconscious, and much thought is given to whether having weekly (or even monthly) meetings is necessary.

It was 2006 before the contractors were ready to start breaking ground, and that wasn’t the only thing that was broken. Within the first month, while working on a saw cut of the road for temporary service to a pump station, the power lines for the lights were knocked down (no one was hurt, and the power company made the repair in one day), a 16-inch plug blew out on a new line pressure test, and the first backhoe bucket to go in the ground (even after repeatedly pointing out where the fiber optic line was) caught the line and knocked out the supervisory control and data acquisition to that location.

It seemed like all of this was setting the tone for the project, but it was like eerie Halloween music. We could have been lucky to have virgin ground, but that was not the case; and when you have pieces of plan sets, not really as-builts, these things are going to happen.

What I considered extremely lucky (for me) was George Burns, the salty, tenured, verbally colorful construction project superintendent who ran roughshod over the contractors and subcontractors. I still have three voicemails saved on my phone that I listen to whenever I want to brighten my mood, make me laugh, and wonder how someone can use so many curse words in one sentence without taking a breath. He knew what red lines were, and he made sure that everyone made them.

I hate to get started here, because I’m not going to mention everyone that we were lucky to have, but I must mention a few of the Malcolm Pirnie team: Ed Balchon, vice president, who probably still cringes when he sees me; Mike Demko, project manager (the Demko Zone); Ifetayo Venner, process design (OXOX); Mike Sutton, instrumentation and controls; and Daryl Ciliberto, the project inspector contracted for the expansion project. There were more, but this handful was amazing to work with.

Ironically, behind the scenes Lynn Spivey was also involved in the project, and fortunately for us, eventually moved here years later to be our utilities director. From Encore Matthew there was Nolan Hake, the project manager who was excellent to work with; George Burns (mentioned previously); and Robert Hoffman and Ashton Roth, the plant operations maintenance masters.

Internally, I was lucky to have Frank Coughenour, the utilities operations engineer and a stickler for details, and Steve Saffels, utilities operations superintendent, who brought into Plant City the first load of dirt in 1974—an invaluable resource. This project was done using a construction management at risk (CMAR) approach.

There were some long days and nights, and not all of the operators got to see all of the construction activities, piping, and new equipment installed, but they will need to be trained on everything, so time (and pay) need to be disseminated before they are going to be operating.

In our case, it was determined that it would be less expensive to build new oxidation ditches and clarifiers; then, the extensive work and structural modifications would be required to reuse the existing aeration basins. We were lucky to have excellent vendors that provided training services and routed as many operators as we could through each of the classes.

So, on Feb. 1, 2008, we started putting the new plant online (almost two years after the construction started), and there is so much I’m not mentioning (all the permitting, reviewing, coordinating, change orders, etc.). One could say we had Murphy’s luck with the new plant start-up; we seeded the plant successfully, but it still took about nine months to iron out some issues, and then a bit more time to do some fine-tuning.

The FWEA Earle B. Phelps Award traveling trophy, which the first-place winner gets to keep for a year.

The Plant City Water Reclamation Facility (WRF) achieved its first year of no exceedances in 2011, and in 2012, won first place in the FWEA Earle B. Phelps Award. To date the WRF has achieved 11 Earle B. Phelps Awards (five first-place, three runner-up, and three honorable mention). And even though we took runner-up in 2022, our total nitrogen (TN) annual average was 0.713 mg/L and our total phosphorus (TP) annual average was 0.142 mg/L. This is something that each one of the Plant City operators can be proud of, and having numbers like that for over a decade now speaks volumes to those that had their fingers in the building project.

So, get ‘er done; then get your plant nominated for an award.

Keep up the good work, get involved, and thank you for doing all you do every single day, in and out! Let’s keep that water clean! S