"Ask yourself - will things really change if we have no plan?"

OHM's Bill Costick, director of community relations and retired city manager of Farmington Hills, Michigan, looks ahead to 2020. What a community needs today is a positive and exciting vision for the future of its downtown, neighborhoods, commercial corridor, and/or waterfront. With a willingness to nurture the vision at every opportunity, by 2020 your community just might realize its dream.

This paper will depict “a tale of two storms” highlighting the challenges that antecedent moisture effects present in modeling and sizing of wet weather capital upgrades, and how modeling technology borrowed from the aerospace industry is able to solve it. The complex paths of inflow and infiltration (I/I) result in interaction with the subsurface soils, and groundwater table, which cause sanitary collection system flows to be highly dependent on the wetness, or antecedent moisture, of the system.

A water system experiencing significant and costly flow fluctuations was the impetus for implementing a new system strategy for managing water storage facilities. In an article published in the Great Lakes Reporter, OHM's Carrie Cox profiles how system control changes saved money and provided peace of mind to a community facing significant rate increases.

OHM's Matt Parks explores some of the best trenchless methods for repairing sanitary sewer pipes, including one of the newest options - quick seal UV spot repair.

In a paper they delivered at the American Water Works Association’s national conference, ACE11, in June 2011, OHMers Carrie Cox, PE, and Vyto Kaunelis, PE, share case studies of how several southeast Michigan communities successfully trimmed costs by managing their water usage.  

As a stormwater pollution load estimation model, the Simple Method is quick, easy, and straightforward. However, there may be some overestimation of the output pollution load. OHMs Scott Kaiser and Murat Ulasir suggest an adjustment to this method in a paper published by Stormwater Magazine.