We have two different water treatment plants here.
We really try to be cost efficient with our chemical.
That's really critical to keep our costs as efficient as we can be and try to keep the rates as reasonable as we can.
And we're monitoring the costs daily, each chemical and each treatment plant, which is more favorable to treat.
The other thing, we do have two sources of water, the Red River and the Cheyenne River.
So whichever is most suitable to treat from a cost and quality, that's what we choose to do.
So we have two treatment plants, an older line softening plant that can produce roughly 30 million gallons per day.
A newer membrane plant that can produce 15 million gallons per day.
A typical average usage in the wintertime in the city of Fargo is right around 14 or 15 million gallons per day.
And in the summer, it almost doubles.
We've seen peak flows up to 32, 33 million gallons per day.
So attributed to that is a lot of lawn watering.
It really increases or doubles the demand on the treatment plant in the summertime.
Some of the things you might not think about that impacts the water in the city of Fargo.
If there is a heavy rain, there is dams and reservoirs in the state.
The snow melt, the spring flooding, that brings a lot of turbidity or cloudiness of the water.
And then with seasons, with the river freezing over, we can run into frazzle ice.
We have a lot of things that we have to watch out for.
One thing really important to us is drought supply, Red River Valley Water Supply Project.
We recently completed a pumping station that will lift water out of the Cheyenne River
and it'll run by open channel all the way to water treatment plant.
In Fargo, we have to have the plant operated 24-7 because sometimes we're making 20, 30, 40 changes a day
because the river in Fargo can change really fast and we really strive to provide consistent water quality.
We have online instrumentations and operators constantly looking at water quality trends,
the flows that are going out of the plant, the chemicals that we're using.
Our river is very challenging and we do have to make a lot of changes throughout the day.
So in the city of Fargo, we do have 11 water towers and we have a computer model of the entire water system
which has all of the pipes, all the water towers, our ground storage reservoir in it.
In a typical water tower, when you design them, you can think of it as having a couple different sections in the water tower.
One of the sections is used for fire protection.
If there's a fire in town, there's water that's readily available to the hydrants in the city.
There's another section in the water tower that's for equalization storage.
So like in the morning when everybody's using the water, there's a really big demand on the water system.
And then there's one other section in the water tower that's kind of reserve or emergency storage also.
One of the cool things about working in Fargo is we work with several other departments.
We work, I think, very well as a team together in getting projects done, so it's really important.
So we deliver really good projects for our system.
Thank you.