What a Water and Wastewater Engineering Company Does

The phrase covers several different businesses

"Water and wastewater engineering" is used by firms that do quite different work. Before comparing companies it helps to know which of these a project actually needs:

• Site and development utility design. Designing the water distribution and sanitary sewer that serve a development — mains, services, gravity sewer, force mains, lift stations, booster pump stations — and permitting their connection to the serving utility. This is civil engineering, and it is usually done by the same firm that designs the site's grading and drainage.
• Municipal system engineering. Master planning, capacity and hydraulic modeling, condition assessment and rehabilitation of a city's or utility's networks, pump stations and pipelines, and the capital improvement programs that follow.
• Treatment plant engineering. Process design of water and wastewater treatment plants. This is a specialist discipline, often a separate firm or a separate practice within a large one.
• Operations and maintenance. Running plants and systems. Not engineering in the design sense, though some firms do both.

A developer connecting a project to municipal service needs the first. A utility with inflow and infiltration, overflows or aging pipes needs the second. A plant expansion needs the third.

What the work involves

For a development or site:

• Confirming that the serving utility has the capacity to take the project on, and securing a capacity or availability letter.
• Hydraulic modeling of the water system for pressure, flow and fire flow.
• Design of water mains, sanitary sewer, force mains and, where gravity will not do, a lift station.
• Grease interceptors for food service, and septic systems or septic-to-sewer conversion where municipal sewer is not available.
• Permits with the utility, the county or city, the state environmental agency and the health department, and coordination with the transportation department for work in the right-of-way.

For a utility or municipality:

• Flow monitoring and inflow-and-infiltration analysis to find where extraneous water enters the sewer.
• Smoke and dye testing, camera inspection and flow isolation to locate defects.
• Condition assessment of pipes, manholes, pump and lift stations, with rehabilitation priorities.
• Capital improvement planning and the engineering reports that regulators and lenders require.
• Design of pipeline, pump station and lift station upgrades, and construction administration through acceptance.

How to tell which firm a project needs

• Ask whether the firm designs for developers, for utilities, or for plants — and how much of its work is each.
• Ask who will model the system and who will seal the drawings.
• Ask which serving utilities and permitting agencies the firm has worked with for the site's jurisdiction.
• For an existing system, ask what evaluation methods they use — flow monitoring, smoke and dye testing, camera inspection — and what the deliverable is.
• For a development, ask whether they also do the site civil work, because water and sewer design is coordinated with grading and drainage.

Where RSP Engineers fits

RSP Engineers does the first two kinds of work: utility infrastructure design for developments — water distribution, sanitary sewer, booster pump and lift stations, septic-to-sewer conversion, grease interceptors and septic systems, with the permitting — and sanitary sewer evaluation surveys for municipal and private systems, with flow monitoring, smoke and dye testing, camera inspection and capital improvement planning. The market pages for water distribution pipelines and sewer pipelines and pump stations describe that work. Treatment plant process design is not among the services described on this site.

Tell us about the project — the site or the system, and what it needs — and we will come back to you about scope.