All wastewater treatment plants in Nevada are required to have operations and maintenance (O&M) manuals approved by the Division of Environmental Protection. Since the last professional engineering contractor (Kennedy-Jenks) provided an O&M manual in 1985 the treatment plant has undergone significant upgrades and changes. Consequently, the manual is now insufficient for adequate operations.

The electronic O&M manual (EOMM) project was begun last year in an effort to correct this deficiency. Council approved the contract with Carollo Engineers for preparation of the EOMM in June, 2013. In this award it was contemplated that a local engineering firm, Farr West Engineering, would support Carollo with document gathering and field verification. This local support drastically reduces the cost of gathering and sorting thousands of documents and field verifying the accuracy of those documents. To that end, Farr West Engineering was issued a purchase order for $45,000 to begin this work.

Discussion: Having begun the work contemplated in the original proposal, it is now possible to estimate the total effort that will be needed to assemble and organize the three decades of information that has accumulated since the last O&M Manual was prepared. The current proposal will bring this effort to conclusion, with the end product being an electronic data base that accurately reflects current conditions at the treatment plant. Under prior management the equipment numbers for the entire facility encompassing several thousand individual pieces of equipment were changed to 4-digit numbers. These numbers do not correspond to any of the plant drawings and cannot be implemented in Phase I of TMWRF technology upgrades. Additionally, this information will be needed for subsequent phases of the technology project: Computerized Maintenance Management (Phase 2) or Asset Management (Phase 3). Performing this work now will expedite the work in subsequent phases. Part of Farr West’s support will include correcting all equipment numbers to the record drawings and assigning logical numbers to all equipment and changing all record drawings to match this numbering system. This accomplishes a key component of the front-end work that will have to be done at the outset of phases 2 and 3 of TMWRF technology upgrades. In addition, since the award of the EOMM project, five (5) major CIP projects were in differing states of progress at TMWRF. Farr West will also facilitate equipment ID updating for the drawings submitted with each of the projects as listed below: •CDM Smith - Power Upgrades, (Electrical Emergency) •Stantec - Septage Receiving •CR Engineering - HVAC Upgrades •Brown and Caldwell - Primary Influent Discharge Valve Vault (Headworks Emergency) •HDR Engineering – Nitrification Valve Rehabilitation •Carollo - Gas Conditioning. Farr West is also reviewing all TMWRF internal projects and updating drawings to reflect changes that were made outside of CIP projects so that accurate drawings will be included in the EOMM. The Truckee Meadows Water Reclamation Facility is a vital asset for the cities of Reno and Sparks that must be operated in compliance with all regulatory requirements.

TMWRF staff understands the need and importance of having an up-to-date, accurate and user-friendly Operations and Maintenance manual that provides the basis for operating the facility. The benefit to the ratepayer and the city will be improved training of staff, preservation and accessibility of knowledge, and more efficient operations without the need for engineering and training staff associated with large regional facilities such as TMWRF.