A power outage at a Manhattan Beach, Calif., pump station resulted in the largest wastewater spill in a decade. Although the facility had a SCADA system in place, a combination of equipment and communication failures occurred, causing extreme flooding. Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County officials knew that such an event could never occur again, so they turned to RACO for a solution.
Many cities and unincorporated areas in Los Angeles County are separated from the main metropolitan area by mountains, so communications options are limited. The current SCADA system used landlines, so a backup system would need to use either radio or wireless technology. RACO personnel visited the system’s most important pump stations and determined that the web-based AlarmAgent.com would be best.
To get the Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles county started with the system, RACO personnel visited their offices to educate personnel on using the AlarmAgent.com website. They also visited all of the pump stations to ensure each had the necessary signal strength and sent out test units for Sanitations Districts employees to try.
Today, all 53 pump stations in Los Angeles County use AlarmAgent.com for alarm notification backup. An operations team runs a field office to monitor the system for the entire county, monitoring the pump stations and coordinating response teams any time an alarm occurs.
The AlarmAgent.com system has proved its worth on many occasions, including an incident that occurred just hours after it was installed. A pump station on Pacific Highway #1 lost power, cutting out the SCADA system. AlarmAgent.com was able to notify personnel, who were able to monitor the situation until power was restored.
The Sanitations Districts have been so pleased with the system for their wastewater management operations that they decided to implement it for their solid waste operations, too. An AlarmAgent.com system recently was installed in an L.A. County landfill, one of the largest in the country.
Learn more about L.A. County and the AlarmAgent.com system by reading the complete case study and visiting the AlarmAgent.com product page.
