The Secrets of Their Success
In Boston, an aggressive program instituted by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority reduced water demand to its lowest point in almost 100 years.
Think of water conservation efforts in response to US regional water-supply concerns and the arid Southwest, the West, or Florida may come to mind. But an aggressive program undertaken years ago in Massachusetts stemmed off a potential water problem and today, Boston-area water users’ demand is at its lowest since 1911 and is down one-third since the 1980s.
The Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) is a water and sewer wholesaler that serves 2.5-million water customers in 50 communities in metropolitan Boston. Its water reduction approach was influenced in part by drought concerns, but ultimately the MWRA focused on reducing water usage by developing a program that would identify system leaks and change the way people think about water use.
Historically, the region depended upon a safe yield of about 300-million gallons per day (mgd), with water primarily drawn from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs. The concern about the prolonged drought triggered an examination of new water sources.
“Starting in the mid-1970s, we began every year to be regularly withdrawing more from the reservoir than we should have been safely withdrawing,” says Steve Estes-Smargiassi, planning director for the MWRA. “If we had had a prolonged drought, we wouldn’t have had enough water to go around.”
During the 1980s, the system had been using more than 300 mgd, and the MWRA predicted the area’s consumption could jump to 450 mgd 20 years into the future.
The MWRA was created in 1985 to take over from a failed state agency to deal with the Boston Harbor cleanup. One of its board’s first decisions was to choose among the water-supply alternatives. The board instead instituted on-demand management in an effort to reduce demand as the area faced an insufficient water supply for current and future needs. “Choosing a new supply alternative was going to be very costly and time-consuming from a political view—the big fights over taking water out of another river,” notes Estes-Smargiassi.
As the program’s manager, his task was to reduce demand by 10% in three years. He created extensive progress reports, attended meetings, and hired consultants and leak-detection crews. “We reduced demand by more than 10% in the first three years, so we went from 340 million gallons in the early 1980s to below 300 million by 1989 two years after the program started,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The drop continues to this day. The success of the MRWA’s program became apparent in 1997 when the total system demand was reduced from 336 mgd in 1987 to 256 mgd. By 2006, the city’s demand has evened out at around 212 mgd as opposed to the 450 mgd projected by the MWRA.
“That’s pretty impressive,” notes Estes-Smargiassi. “Boston grew in population during that point of time and then shrank later at some point, but we are bigger than we were in the 1980s and have still seen a reduction.”
Estes-Smargiassi attributes that partially to continued efforts and other factors, such as the change in codes for toilets, in which the MWRA played a part. Other primary factors influencing the substantial water-usage reduction focused on pipeline rehabilitation and a cultural change on how people use water, Estes-Smargiassi says. Pipeline rehabilitation, addition of new treatments and fixing the wastewater system meant prices escalated even as demand has declined. When prices increase by 600%, “That has people’s attention,” Estes-Smargiassi points out. “They’ve been quite responsive to information about conservation.”
 |
Photo: MWRA/Karen J. Dodge |
| Massachusetts Water Resource Authority’s Massachusetts Reservoir |
The MWRA began the process by examining the water’s path from reservoir to tap, contemplating short- and long-term solutions. “We looked at where the water was going and how could we plug up the leaks and make it more efficient,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The MWRA found it was unable to account for one-third of the water. “That was not necessarily leaks, but water which was leaving the reservoirs but was not metered or otherwise accounted as being sold,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “It might have been because some people didn’t have adequate meters in place or had public uses which weren’t metered. Some of it was obviously leaks.”
Leak detection was the first order of business for the MWRA. The authority initiated free leak detection throughout the 6,000 miles of community pipes that it did not own. The cities were sent a report identifying leaks and in return were expected to notify the MWRA that repairs were done. Additionally, properly sized, new meters were installed and existing meters were resized to address inaccuracies connected with improperly sized meters.
Another set of the MWRA programs focused on another one-third of the water use: the 5,000 significant water-using commercial/industrial/institutional–sector customers. “We were not going to go out and do something with every single industry, so we did a sector-based audit program,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We hired mechanical engineers who did water audits with consultants upon request.”
Case studies were developed so various industry sectors could share them within their particular trade association. Changing that sector’s culture meant moving from the ’70s notion that facility management meant keeping roads paved and floors polished to thinking about utilities—including water—as being a significant cost factor, Estes-Smargiassi notes.
The MWRA found during some site visits in the industrial/commercial/institutional sector that low-pressure, high-volume wash rinses were being used and by using different nozzles, the site could use one-tenth the amount of water while obtaining better rinse power.
Also, in a traditional rinsing system, water would go through five rinse trays, getting progressively cleaner toward the end of the tray train and being dumped down the drain at the end. “Smart industries do what’s called ‘counter flow;’ the last rinse, the cleanest water, is used in the previous rinse tanks,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “You would use the water five times before you throw it away.”
The last one-third of water use was the residential sector. “The difference between our program and a number of other programs was that we were looking for permanent, long-term, year-round savings,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We were not doing this based on a drought plan. Sometimes people confuse conservation with drought response. “This was not on the level of a ‘take a shorter shower,’ ‘don’t water your lawns on Tuesdays’ sort of program. That works well if you’ve got a six-month horizon or if you only have to do it once. But if you want people to save water permanently, you’ve got to be looking for ways to permanently change water use.”
The program exclusively focused on indoor water use. Unlike elsewhere in the US, the Northeast doesn’t use much water outdoors. Seasonal use, such as lawn watering, only accounts for an average of 7% of water use in the Boston region, although studies show other communities, such as Dallas, TX, were using 23% of their water supplies for outdoor use.
The MWRA embarked on an education campaign of subway posters, bill stuffers, and public service announcements. “We did market testing and focus groups to figure out what messages got people to change their behavior, because just talking doesn’t do it,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We were concerned about actually saving water, not just having a program.”
One solution seemed to be changing inefficient fixtures. Estes-Smargiassi rejected claims from elsewhere in the US that utilities would garner 85% penetration doing door hangers or leaving devices in bags on people’s doors. The MWRA officials had not seen much in water savings after having given away showerheads and toilet devices.
“We discovered if you gave away devices, most of them were ‘installed’ in kitchen drawers—not on the bathroom or kitchen fixtures,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
When residents installed devices, “We found people installed them in the opposite frequency with which they saved water,” Estes-Smargiassi notes. “Toilet devices saved the most water, but nobody wanted to muck around in the tank. Showerheads saved the next most water, but people were afraid of breaking their shower, so they mostly installed aerators in the kitchen and bathroom, which saved water, but not a lot.
“The measure was not how many devices you give away or even how many get installed, but how many gallons do you save per dollar.”
To accomplish that, The MWRA hired subcontractors to go door-to-door and if the resident was interested in installation assistance, someone would respond within 20 minutes to install the devices. “They did not get paid for the home visit unless they installed at least two significant devices—a shower head and a toilet dam—or two shower heads,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We didn’t care how many aerators were installed, but they had to install the other devices.”
The program cost $15 per household for installed devices. The MWRA audited the program to ensure jobs were being completed. In the end, the MWRA achieved a 55% market penetration—those who had the devices installed—across the service area. The outreach program also included a school education program, approved water metering on the wholesale level, and technical assistance programs to help communities improve rate structures and building structures to make them more efficient.
Newer technologies, such as smart meters, also are being utilized.
“Boston has installed continuous remote reading meters for all its customers, starting with the biggest users first” says Estes-Smargiassi. “In some of the suburban communities, an alarm is set to go off if your water usage changes dramatically. Users get a printout. Some towns contact people if it looks like the water use has changed in a way that doesn’t make sense.
“It’s a lot easier if you can tell a customer they are suddenly using a lot of water, than waiting for the bill. In some cases people who pay quarterly and have had a leak for all that time can be pretty shocked by the bill.”
While the MWRA still gives away devices but no longer installs them or conducts audits because for-profit firms are now doing so, the authority continues to regularly track water. “We are prepared to launch more aggressive programs if we need to, or if there was a drought,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The MWRA’s planning drought is based on the 1960s drought that affected states in the mid-Atlantic to the northeast, setting an historic record, says Estes-Smargiassi. “It certainly is a 100-year drought—the worst in that time period,” he adds.
Although the region isn’t prone to such droughts, Estes-Smargiassi says he doesn’t like to plan for anything less conservative. “If we ever ran out of water, I want to be able to say it’s because it was a drought worse than the one we’ve already seen,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “Some folks will plan for a 20- or 50-year drought. Here in New England, I’ve seen three 20-year droughts in the 25 years I’ve been doing this. All of them were much less severe than the drought in the ’60s. So we plan for a very severe drought. We would be able to supply our customers water easily in a drought as severe as that.”
Estes-Smargiassi says the classic approach to solving water use problems is locating new supplies. “That’s how I was trained as an engineer and planner,” he notes. “All the textbooks showed an increase in demand and then a series of step functions with a saw-tooth pattern of increasing the supply to match increasing demand.”
The alternative of reducing the demand instead of increasing supply has given the MWRA the flexibility to expand the service area and solve other public health or environmental water problems, Estes-Smargiassi notes. “One of the things bedeviling parts of the country—particularly in the northeast— is small rivers, because people are pumping too much water for water supply and not letting the stormwater infiltrate back into the ground because everything is paved over.
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“We just added a couple of customers who had decent supplies from a water-quality perspective, but those supplies were having an impact on the local environment,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “Now, one of those customers is using less water in the summer and the other customer is using less year round from wells which were near a stream in which dry weather affected the stream flow.
“Our conservation efforts and improved efficiency might not have been possible without reducing the demand.”
Author's Bio: Journalist Carol Brzozowski lives in Coral Springs, FL.
January-February 2008
The Secrets of Their Success
In Boston, an aggressive program instituted by the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority reduced water demand to its lowest point in almost 100 years.
Think of water conservation efforts in response to US regional water-supply concerns and the arid Southwest, the West, or Florida may come to mind. But an aggressive program undertaken years ago in Massachusetts stemmed off a potential water problem and today, Boston-area water users’ demand is at its lowest since 1911 and is down one-third since the 1980s.
The Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA) is a water and sewer wholesaler that serves 2.5-million water customers in 50 communities in metropolitan Boston. Its water reduction approach was influenced in part by drought concerns, but ultimately the MWRA focused on reducing water usage by developing a program that would identify system leaks and change the way people think about water use.
Historically, the region depended upon a safe yield of about 300-million gallons per day (mgd), with water primarily drawn from the Quabbin and Wachusett reservoirs. The concern about the prolonged drought triggered an examination of new water sources.
“Starting in the mid-1970s, we began every year to be regularly withdrawing more from the reservoir than we should have been safely withdrawing,” says Steve Estes-Smargiassi, planning director for the MWRA. “If we had had a prolonged drought, we wouldn’t have had enough water to go around.”
During the 1980s, the system had been using more than 300 mgd, and the MWRA predicted the area’s consumption could jump to 450 mgd 20 years into the future.
The MWRA was created in 1985 to take over from a failed state agency to deal with the Boston Harbor cleanup. One of its board’s first decisions was to choose among the water-supply alternatives. The board instead instituted on-demand management in an effort to reduce demand as the area faced an insufficient water supply for current and future needs. “Choosing a new supply alternative was going to be very costly and time-consuming from a political view—the big fights over taking water out of another river,” notes Estes-Smargiassi.
As the program’s manager, his task was to reduce demand by 10% in three years. He created extensive progress reports, attended meetings, and hired consultants and leak-detection crews. “We reduced demand by more than 10% in the first three years, so we went from 340 million gallons in the early 1980s to below 300 million by 1989 two years after the program started,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The drop continues to this day. The success of the MRWA’s program became apparent in 1997 when the total system demand was reduced from 336 mgd in 1987 to 256 mgd. By 2006, the city’s demand has evened out at around 212 mgd as opposed to the 450 mgd projected by the MWRA.
“That’s pretty impressive,” notes Estes-Smargiassi. “Boston grew in population during that point of time and then shrank later at some point, but we are bigger than we were in the 1980s and have still seen a reduction.”
Estes-Smargiassi attributes that partially to continued efforts and other factors, such as the change in codes for toilets, in which the MWRA played a part. Other primary factors influencing the substantial water-usage reduction focused on pipeline rehabilitation and a cultural change on how people use water, Estes-Smargiassi says. Pipeline rehabilitation, addition of new treatments and fixing the wastewater system meant prices escalated even as demand has declined. When prices increase by 600%, “That has people’s attention,” Estes-Smargiassi points out. “They’ve been quite responsive to information about conservation.”
|
Photo: MWRA/Karen J. Dodge |
| Massachusetts Water Resource Authority’s Massachusetts Reservoir |
The MWRA began the process by examining the water’s path from reservoir to tap, contemplating short- and long-term solutions. “We looked at where the water was going and how could we plug up the leaks and make it more efficient,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The MWRA found it was unable to account for one-third of the water. “That was not necessarily leaks, but water which was leaving the reservoirs but was not metered or otherwise accounted as being sold,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “It might have been because some people didn’t have adequate meters in place or had public uses which weren’t metered. Some of it was obviously leaks.”
Leak detection was the first order of business for the MWRA. The authority initiated free leak detection throughout the 6,000 miles of community pipes that it did not own. The cities were sent a report identifying leaks and in return were expected to notify the MWRA that repairs were done. Additionally, properly sized, new meters were installed and existing meters were resized to address inaccuracies connected with improperly sized meters.
Another set of the MWRA programs focused on another one-third of the water use: the 5,000 significant water-using commercial/industrial/institutional–sector customers. “We were not going to go out and do something with every single industry, so we did a sector-based audit program,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We hired mechanical engineers who did water audits with consultants upon request.”
Case studies were developed so various industry sectors could share them within their particular trade association. Changing that sector’s culture meant moving from the ’70s notion that facility management meant keeping roads paved and floors polished to thinking about utilities—including water—as being a significant cost factor, Estes-Smargiassi notes.
The MWRA found during some site visits in the industrial/commercial/institutional sector that low-pressure, high-volume wash rinses were being used and by using different nozzles, the site could use one-tenth the amount of water while obtaining better rinse power.
Also, in a traditional rinsing system, water would go through five rinse trays, getting progressively cleaner toward the end of the tray train and being dumped down the drain at the end. “Smart industries do what’s called ‘counter flow;’ the last rinse, the cleanest water, is used in the previous rinse tanks,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “You would use the water five times before you throw it away.”
The last one-third of water use was the residential sector. “The difference between our program and a number of other programs was that we were looking for permanent, long-term, year-round savings,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We were not doing this based on a drought plan. Sometimes people confuse conservation with drought response. “This was not on the level of a ‘take a shorter shower,’ ‘don’t water your lawns on Tuesdays’ sort of program. That works well if you’ve got a six-month horizon or if you only have to do it once. But if you want people to save water permanently, you’ve got to be looking for ways to permanently change water use.”
The program exclusively focused on indoor water use. Unlike elsewhere in the US, the Northeast doesn’t use much water outdoors. Seasonal use, such as lawn watering, only accounts for an average of 7% of water use in the Boston region, although studies show other communities, such as Dallas, TX, were using 23% of their water supplies for outdoor use.
The MWRA embarked on an education campaign of subway posters, bill stuffers, and public service announcements. “We did market testing and focus groups to figure out what messages got people to change their behavior, because just talking doesn’t do it,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We were concerned about actually saving water, not just having a program.”
One solution seemed to be changing inefficient fixtures. Estes-Smargiassi rejected claims from elsewhere in the US that utilities would garner 85% penetration doing door hangers or leaving devices in bags on people’s doors. The MWRA officials had not seen much in water savings after having given away showerheads and toilet devices.
“We discovered if you gave away devices, most of them were ‘installed’ in kitchen drawers—not on the bathroom or kitchen fixtures,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
When residents installed devices, “We found people installed them in the opposite frequency with which they saved water,” Estes-Smargiassi notes. “Toilet devices saved the most water, but nobody wanted to muck around in the tank. Showerheads saved the next most water, but people were afraid of breaking their shower, so they mostly installed aerators in the kitchen and bathroom, which saved water, but not a lot.
“The measure was not how many devices you give away or even how many get installed, but how many gallons do you save per dollar.”
To accomplish that, The MWRA hired subcontractors to go door-to-door and if the resident was interested in installation assistance, someone would respond within 20 minutes to install the devices. “They did not get paid for the home visit unless they installed at least two significant devices—a shower head and a toilet dam—or two shower heads,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “We didn’t care how many aerators were installed, but they had to install the other devices.”
The program cost $15 per household for installed devices. The MWRA audited the program to ensure jobs were being completed. In the end, the MWRA achieved a 55% market penetration—those who had the devices installed—across the service area. The outreach program also included a school education program, approved water metering on the wholesale level, and technical assistance programs to help communities improve rate structures and building structures to make them more efficient.
Newer technologies, such as smart meters, also are being utilized.
“Boston has installed continuous remote reading meters for all its customers, starting with the biggest users first” says Estes-Smargiassi. “In some of the suburban communities, an alarm is set to go off if your water usage changes dramatically. Users get a printout. Some towns contact people if it looks like the water use has changed in a way that doesn’t make sense.
“It’s a lot easier if you can tell a customer they are suddenly using a lot of water, than waiting for the bill. In some cases people who pay quarterly and have had a leak for all that time can be pretty shocked by the bill.”
While the MWRA still gives away devices but no longer installs them or conducts audits because for-profit firms are now doing so, the authority continues to regularly track water. “We are prepared to launch more aggressive programs if we need to, or if there was a drought,” says Estes-Smargiassi.
The MWRA’s planning drought is based on the 1960s drought that affected states in the mid-Atlantic to the northeast, setting an historic record, says Estes-Smargiassi. “It certainly is a 100-year drought—the worst in that time period,” he adds.
Although the region isn’t prone to such droughts, Estes-Smargiassi says he doesn’t like to plan for anything less conservative. “If we ever ran out of water, I want to be able to say it’s because it was a drought worse than the one we’ve already seen,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “Some folks will plan for a 20- or 50-year drought. Here in New England, I’ve seen three 20-year droughts in the 25 years I’ve been doing this. All of them were much less severe than the drought in the ’60s. So we plan for a very severe drought. We would be able to supply our customers water easily in a drought as severe as that.”
Estes-Smargiassi says the classic approach to solving water use problems is locating new supplies. “That’s how I was trained as an engineer and planner,” he notes. “All the textbooks showed an increase in demand and then a series of step functions with a saw-tooth pattern of increasing the supply to match increasing demand.”
The alternative of reducing the demand instead of increasing supply has given the MWRA the flexibility to expand the service area and solve other public health or environmental water problems, Estes-Smargiassi notes. “One of the things bedeviling parts of the country—particularly in the northeast— is small rivers, because people are pumping too much water for water supply and not letting the stormwater infiltrate back into the ground because everything is paved over.
“We just added a couple of customers who had decent supplies from a water-quality perspective, but those supplies were having an impact on the local environment,” says Estes-Smargiassi. “Now, one of those customers is using less water in the summer and the other customer is using less year round from wells which were near a stream in which dry weather affected the stream flow.
“Our conservation efforts and improved efficiency might not have been possible without reducing the demand.”