Aaron Keck, Vishnu Gangadharan and Alison Spinelli

This week on “Wonderful Water,” join Aaron Keck for a conversation with Vishnu Gangadharan, OWASA‘s capital improvement projects engineering manager since 2006, and OWASA asset manager Alison Spinelli about the infrastructure that makes a crucial utility possible.

According to OWASA, the non-profit utility agency invests roughly $20 million each year for capital improvement projects — work to create and maintain the infrastructure that supports delivery of fresh water and removal of wastewater across Orange County.

“When you think about infrastructure, water and sewer infrastructure, in the life of that infrastructure, these are components that will last 60, 80, 100 years,” said Gangadharan. “So, really, the purpose of capital projects is to ensure the long-term reliability of the system we’re looking out for projects and installing things that will last for generations.

Two current projects include work on Dobbins Drive, close to Franklin Street, on a “trunk line” that feeds smaller lines that branch out in an underground watershed. The line is old, according to Gangadharan, and needed to be both replaced and upsized in order to handle increased demand.

“At any given time we can have 60, 70 projects going on,” said Gangadharan. “It’s a lot of work. We’ve got a team of six people in the group, but there are a lot of people on any given project team that we work inside OWASA, with the towns, the university, and the department of transportation. Of course, we reach out to the customers who might be affected … we try to minimize, as we can, the impacts of the construction that’s going on”

Of course, the assets that OWASA manages encompass the entire scope of delivering fresh water and getting wastewater to a treatment plant.

“We have that backbone infrastructure of miles of pipe, whether that’s water or sewer, but then we also have all of the different assets that support that primary function of getting water to our customers and taking wastewater to our wastewater treatment plant,”said Spinelli. “So, [assets] can be a variety of different things. Things as small as a test tube in your hand to an eight-ton crane to the trucks that you see driving around on the roads each day. And so it’s a big team effort for us at OWASA to keep all those assets in their best working class, to keep them understood, and to know their condition.”

You can listen below for the full conversation between Aaron Keck, Vishnu Gangadharan and Alison Spinelli, and visit the Wonderful Water page here for more interviews with — and stories from — the people who keep our community growing by keeping the water flowing.

 

Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents use roughly 7 million gallons of water a day, and “Wonderful Water” is a monthly conversation sponsored by the Orange Water and Sewer Authority highlighting its work to keep our community growing and water flowing.

 

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