Overview

For the last 20 years, the Town of North East’s (Town) water department looked to their utility master plan (UMP) to help steer the water company’s efforts towards growth, maintenance, and compliance with Maryland water regulations. Their water system sits atop the Chesapeake Bay, and serves approximately 2,600 customers. It consists of two water treatment plants, 50 miles of mains, five tanks with 1.7 million gallons in storage, and two booster pump stations.

The initial UMP focused on the water treatment process, led to upgrades at the plants, and brought the system into compliance with current water quality standards. We helped the Town develop and new UMP that evaluated the adequacy of the system’s water supply, water quality, treatment, water transmission, distribution and storage, and identified the necessary projects and budgeting required over the next 20 years to continue and sustain the Town’s water system.

We studied all operational aspects of the Town’s water system. First, we evaluated the components of the system, analyzed the past and current system demands, calculated non-revenue water, and consider the anticipated growth over the next 20 years. Entech and the Town also met with the state to discuss possible upcoming drinking water regulations that would impact the Town.

The UMP identified 38 recommended projects, with some being small maintenance items, like regular inspections of all water storage tanks, and others being large capital improvement projects. For example, an upcoming project is cleaning sediment out of the raw water pond at one treatment plant, which will increase the pond’s capacity, improve water quality, and allow for a thorough inspection of the pond to ensure its long-term structural stability.

Since the study began, the Town has a new single-source water customer, who, when added to the natural growth in the system, has the potential to more than double the Town’s water demand over the next 20 years. This means growth at twice the rate expected, and potentially, in large volumes at a time. The plan highlights how many of the larger projects are influenced by how much water this customer ultimately takes, as well as from where within the system, and when they’ll need it.

Now the Town has a plan that will allow them to continue to provide high quality water to customers well into the future.