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� <br />EN HILLS <br />MEMORANDUM <br />DATE: <br />TO: <br />FROM: <br />SUBJECT: <br />January 30, 2012 <br />Honorable Mayor and City Councilmembers <br />Patrick Klaers, City Administrator � <br />Terry Maurer, Pubhc Works Directo� � <br />� <br />Lift Station Updates - Modifications <br />Background <br />During my short tenure with the City there have been several opportunities to discuss the <br />situation with our 14 lift stations. The lack of any standardization makes the operation <br />and maintenance of the lift stations much more difficult than it should be. Specifically, <br />some of the things I have discovered include: <br />• At least four or five different pump manufacturers are used in the 141ift stations. <br />• One of the prominent pumps present in our lift stations, Pump X, ceased <br />manufacturing in 2005 and discontinued the manufacture of spare parts in 2010. <br />• The operating system used in our most recently reconstructed lift stations, Sycom, <br />is proprietary software and the one vendor that services it has become very <br />unreliable. <br />• Electro Watchman, who we use for monitoring alarms at our lift stations, is not <br />able to provide basic information about alarms. For instance, when Lift Station <br />#8 was overwhelmed by rain water in July 2011, Electro Watchman sent many <br />messages to our Public Works crew about alarms. However, when we were <br />working with the LMC insurance adjuster, we discovered that Electro Watchman <br />could not tell us if Lift Station #8 ever lost power. They could only tell us that <br />there were alarms at specific times, not what the alarm was indicating. <br />Because of the issue of non-standardization, we had Seth Peterson of Bolton and Menk <br />work with our Public Works crew to come up with a standard design, pump <br />manufacturer, and standard control system for all our lift stations that would then become <br />the model for the design of the reconstruction of LS #13. This process took several <br />months and even included site visits by some of our Public Works crew to two service <br />departments of pump manufacturers to review their pumps and see their service <br />departments. After this process we established Flygt pumps as the standard for all our lift <br />stations. <br />City Council Meeting <br />C:\Users\sonj a.klingberg�Desktop\1-30-12LiftStationUpdate.doc <br />Page 1 of 3 <br />