City of Charlotte, NC Behind the Crown, 18 Nov 2022

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From YouTube: Protecting Charlotte's Water Mains with Alan Gaines | Behind the Crown

Description

“I’m like the weatherman for Charlotte Water.”

As a senior engineer with Charlotte #Water, Alan Gaines provides a forecast to department leaders to prepare for short- and long-term conditions to ensure water connectivity for customers. Learn more about Alan and his work with Charlotte Water in the latest edition of Behind the Crown.

Behind the Crown highlights the people who keep the City of Charlotte running. If you're interested in starting or extending a career in public service, explore opportunities with the City of Charlotte on our jobs board: https://cltgov.me/careers.

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A

One of the things that I think a lot of people don't realize is Charlotte. Water is a 24 7 operation. That's something that I really like to highlight, because I think a lot of people just don't think about it when they get water from their Cactus. There's a person making sure that gets there.

A

My name is Alan Gaines I'm, a senior engineer with Charlotte water. My job is looking at the master planning for the utility over the next five to thirty years, I'm like the weatherman for Charlotte water I'm, giving a forecast of what we think things are going to be like if we do certain things in our system or when certain future conditions occur. The Charlotte Waters distribution system is over 4 400 miles long you're, looking at the connectivity of the water mains. How do they connect to each other?

A

How do they Supply certain areas of the system? What are the materials that the system is made of, because that will determine the roughness or the amount of energy lost through the system and then different factors of design such as the length the diameter? Those are all factors in evaluating a water distribution system, so these are pieces that we've cut away from a pipe doing a a water meter.

A

Tap these represent are the different materials, but also characteristics of the pipe wall, and so we can take these characteristics and correlate them to a specific Factor called a Hazen, Williams, C Factor, and so that allows us to make a more calculated calibrary decision in our model. So this is a typical hydrant that we would install a pressure recorder on all our pressure recorder. Is it's a little Data Logger that we put on a hydrant?

A

It will record pressures continuously and they'll provide a summary for every minute every hour, and so we can see what the pressures are doing in our system at specific times of the day. So we can then calibrate our model to them. I decided to work for Charlotte water, because when I graduated I I was really interested in environmental engineering, which is uh you know, Water Systems, Wastewater systems and Charlotte water is a large municipality that has a very large utility system and I grew up here and I really want to give back to the community.

A

I grew up in foreign.