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VIENNA -- The Vienna Utility Board discussed options to replace its current water tank level monitoring system at Friday's meeting.
"It's a control system that distributes all of the water in the City of Vienna," Mayor Randy Rapp said. "It sends a signal once the water in the tank reaches a certain level and lets us know whether to turn the valve on or off."
He said while the current system does work, it doesn't have any technical support in case of any malfunctions.
"The system we put in years ago, the company we got it from is no longer in service. The owner passed away," he said. "He was really receptive and helped us if we had problems. Unfortunately he's no longer available."
Michael Davis, Project Engineer with Burgess & Niple, presented the board with two system options. One is a radio signal-based data transmission like the current one in place that will cost $300,000 to upgrade and $24,000 to install antenna poles. The other involves changing to cellular signal data transmission for $300,000 and an estimated $300 monthly usage change.
"I think radio would be fine," Public Works Manager Craig Metz said. "It's worked well for us in years past."
Rapp posed a question in response.
"I guess the crystal ball question is: our system is working fine, but we have no support. So, do you want to take a chance and see how long it lasts or get ahead of it?" he said.
He added, "Cellular is the way to go. You can control these things off your iPhone. Having another piece of external equipment, whether it's radio or whatever, is not the future."
Vienna City Council member Kim Williams said she was concerned about cellular equipment shutting down.
"Do you end up in a situation where cellular doesn't work for whatever reason, like a big disaster? These things have happened before. What's the redundancy," she asked.
"You're absolutely right," Metz replied. "What we're using now, we have backup radio equipment. On a cellular network, we have data collectors that keep our cell. It's in the data. It takes the data from the station into the cellular network."
Williams also asked if the data could be stored locally in the event of a cellular network outage so the pumps can be manually switched. Metz said the data can be sent between the main computer to the individual pump but not store the data.
"From a practical standpoint, the collecting of the data and saving the historical data would be fine, except for if your machine says at 10:02 it received a signal to shut the valve off, you have no way of checking that," Rapp said
He added, "Unless you actually go into the field and look to see if the valve closed," Rapp said. "Unless you had some major issue where you needed to verify that it was closed or opened, it's just a routine operation. There's no need for historical data."
Metz said cell provider AT&T has a priority restoration on emergency services such as police and fire. He said water restoration would be considered high in an emergency.
Rapp said he wanted to gather more information about both system options.
"We should check with the people around us. Parkersburg is obviously much bigger than we are," he said
Kristen Hainkel can be contacted at khainkel@newsandsentinel.com