Hartford's Clean Water Project

The MDC serves eight member munic­i­pal­i­ties and four non-member towns in the greater Hartford area. The MDC has managed these water and sewer systems since 1929, and some of the area’s infra­struc­ture dates back to the 1850s. By the 2000s, normal wet weather storm events were causing the MDC’s aging combined sewer system to become inundated by rainwater, overflowing wastewater into basements, neigh­bor­hood streets and/or waterways over 50 times in an average year. These overflows resulted in a US Envi­ron­men­tal Protection Agency consent decree and Connecticut Department of Energy and Envi­ron­men­tal Protection consent order, which led to the initiation of the Clean Water Project.

The goal of the Clean Water Project is to capture all overflows in an average year, increasing public health, safety and quality of life of the Hartford area and dramat­i­cally improving the water quality of the Connecticut River. As MDC CEO Scott Jellison says, “The river provides economic development and growth and recreation for our citizens, so the Clean Water Project is the right thing for the MDC to do.”

The five major components of the Clean Water project are:

1. Reducing infil­tra­tion and inflow that overloads the system
2. Separating storm sewers from sanitary sewers
3. Construct­ing storage tunnels to store excess wastewater until it can be treated
4. Installing interceptor pipes to increase capacity
5. Improving the Hartford treatment plant, including using excess heat to generate nearly 40% of the plant’s total electricity needs

CDM Smith serves as the program management consultant for the Clean Water Project, coor­di­nat­ing a wide variety of activities and projects. According to Jellison, “The MDC felt strongly that we needed a program manager that could oversee not only the planning and the execution of the engineering aspects, but planning all the aspects associated with the program, including our public outreach and our financial cash flow needs.” In this capacity, CDM Smith assists the MDC with concept development, engineering design, construc­tion coor­di­na­tion, financial planning, consultant and contractor management, data analytics, and more.

In order to implement a smarter approach to monitoring and operating its water analytics process, the Hartford MDC is integrating innovative tools in its daily operations. Using intelligent water modeling and digital twins, real-time simulations of MDC’s system performance are calculated according to current weather and precip­i­ta­tion conditions. Discrep­an­cies between the digital twin and actual response data reveal system-level or detailed statistics about the overflow events and locations, allowing staff to identify critical changes in system operations or performance. 

These new capa­bil­i­ties are enabling more accurate facilities planning to meet the objectives of MDC’s Clean Water Project and, in turn, improving resiliency, risk management, and coor­di­na­tion in design of future capital improvement projects.