Teaming Up to Manage Water

Graham Gagnon 0:01
We all have the same mission, we all share the same purpose, which I think is vital in that we can’t just think about it as, you know, two talking heads at the top of an organization agreeing, but all the way through that folks are agreeing and aligning with.

Wendy Krkosek 0:18
I think, you know, where things can fail is if a research, you know, partnership is established, and there’s very specific outcomes and the research isn’t shared throughout the process, and it isn’t collaborative, and then, you know, here’s the paper and then we’re done and we move on.

Stephanie Reid 0:45
Welcome to Beyond Research. I’m your host Stephanie Reid. 15 years ago, Halifax water asked Dalhousie University to help solve an immediate issue in a treatment plant. This blossomed into a deep relationship where the utility and researchers work in partnership to identify and work on a range of water research challenges. Our guests today are joined by Stefan Leslie, CEO of Research Nova Scotia. Listen as they discuss how they work together, where future problems and water supply and treatment may lie, and the key ingredients to a successful collaboration.

Dr. Graham Gagnon is a Professor in the Department of Civil and Resource Engineering, Director of the Centre for Water Resource Studies and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Dalhousie University.

Graham Gagnon 1:39
The Centre for Water Resources Studies, or the CWRS as we’re sort of known to many, has been around since 1980. So, before I arrived at Dalhousie, you know, it was created by the Faculty of Engineering and the tonnes administration to really respond to more provincial needs.

Stephanie Reid 2:00
Dr. Wendy Krkosek is the Water Quality Manager at Halifax water.

Wendy Krkosek 2:05
Initially, research was brought into the utility for very specific purposes to investigate process optimization for our treatment plants, and it was very prescriptive. Over the years that has evolved significantly, we now have this sort of 15-year research relationship that’s been ongoing and it’s gone much more beyond just prescriptive research, and really the needs for research come from both directions; from Dalhousie sort of telling us what’s up and coming and what we need to be aware of, and also from us telling them, hey, we have a problem and we need to solve this problem.

Stephanie Reid 2:39
She works with the treatment, water quality and distribution operations staff to conduct water quality research, solve challenges impacting water quality and treatment, improve treatment methods, and develop and implement water quality plans. She also holds a PhD in Civil Engineering from Dalhousie University.

Stefan Leslie 3:04
Wendy, can you describe what Halifax Water does? What’s its main service?

Wendy Krkosek 3:08
Our main service is to provide water, wastewater and stormwater services to the Halifax Regional Municipality. And that involves being stewards of the environment and public health professionals.

Stefan Leslie 3:20
And so how has that related to the need for research? Is research allowing you to understand what the state of the art is or what the new things that you need to know are? Or is it both?

Wendy Krkosek 3:30
It’s very much both. So again, at the beginning, it was more us saying we need these questions answered, and now it’s much more Graham will say, hey, this is on the horizon, we’re seeing a lot of this type of thing happening, let’s explore this, see how it’s impacting Halifax Water, is this something we need to look at further? So, we get that direction, which kind of keeps us at the forefront of the industry. And then on the other side, you know, if we suddenly have operational issues, or we see something that’s happening, I can pick up the phone and say, hey, Graham, we’ve got a problem. Can you help?

Stefan Leslie 4:01
Right? And so has this relationship apart from the way research questions or issues have been defined, has the depth of that relationship also changed or the way the interaction has occurred changed?

Wendy Krkosek 4:14
Definitely. I would say it started as a very small group and a very targeted program. And it’s grown throughout in terms of, you know, other additional partners that have been added, which is provided value to the partnership. So, there’s now private industry that’s involved in this research relationship, as well as other municipalities. So, it’s, you know, we have kind of this network in Atlantic Canada that’s been built through the partnership. And then we’ve also expanded in scope just at Halifax Water, so it was optimizing one treatment plant, now it’s looking at our systems as a whole. And a few years ago, we added wastewater on as well as part of the research partnership. So, it’s really kind of evolved and moved throughout the organization.

Stefan Leslie 4:56
So, you mentioned at the very beginning it’s fresh water, it’s water for consumption, it’s wastewater, and its surface water management?

Wendy Krkosek 5:04
Stormwater.

Stefan Leslie 5:05
Stormwater. So, can you describe what each of those three are and how they work together, interrelate?

Wendy Krkosek 5:09
Yes. So, you know, drinking water, we get our water from lakes, and we treat it to drinking water standards, we distribute it through pipes in the ground, to our customers. On the wastewater side, we then pick up that water that our customers have produced, and we treat it and we discharge it to the environment. So, it’s really sort of the full cycle. The way stormwater fits into that, as an old utility, we have some areas of our systems that are combined sewers. And so, it integrates directly into our wastewater treatment process and discharges to the environment. But also, we have, you know, additional stormwater infrastructure in areas that aren’t serviced by centralized wastewater systems or are separated systems as well.

Stefan Leslie 5:51
So, the Monopoly board has water and it has lights, so why is water there? Sell me on the importance of that one.

Wendy Krkosek 6:00
Every community needs water, you need a way to access safe drinking water, and you need a way to dispose safely of the wastewater. You know, as Graham touched on earlier, it’s you can build a house, but you need the water to be able to support the activities within that house or within that business. So, it’s the foundation. And access to safe drinking water is really like we are all public health practitioners, and at the end of the day, we are providing a public health service by providing safe drinking water. So, it’s fundamental. Hospitals wouldn’t exist without clean water, industries wouldn’t exist without clean water. And you know, without the ability to treat the wastewater, we would, you know, be polluting the environment to a point where we wouldn’t have sources of water then to use for other reasons, for recreation, for other uses.

Stefan Leslie 6:46
And so, Graham, how’s this not just piping water in, taking water away? What’s the research need in that space that Wendy just described.

Graham Gagnon 6:55
So, climate change has totally shifted this in that the greatest input we see is the climate or atmosphere, water quality, from algal blooms, from, you know, changes in organic matter, to mobilization of metals are all happening in ways that we have no recipe for, like, we can’t go to a textbook and go, oh, now if we do this intervention, this will solve this. It’s learning, while we tried this, that didn’t work, and we thought that was the problem, but in fact, it’s this. I find it’s incredibly challenging, let alone things that happen this year, you know, wildfires, and go well, what will be the impact of a wildfire on this watershed, which is, of course, surrounded by forests. So very profound is climate change.

Stefan Leslie 7:48
So climate change is everything, it’s not just making it warmer, it’s changing what’s growing in the water, it changes the fire regime, which then affects the water quality. So, it has that flow on effect.

Graham Gagnon 7:57
If we look across the world, whenever cities grow, whenever communities grow, the challenge of water is right in front of them, you know, you can go back to watch Chinatown and say, well, let’s bring the water to the people, from that perspective, or look at Southern California right now where direct potable reuse, so taking wastewater, turning it into drinking water, is now approved in the State of California, because population demand is so high, and the need for water is so great, that that is the option. And we need to really think about it. To Wendy’s point, dimensions of clean water for drinking. A very important dimension of a water utility is fire prevention, and so, you know, when you’re first thinking about designing a pipe, it’s how big is that pipe so if I turn a hydrant on, I can fight a fire. And so one of the things that I looked at it the Joint Regional Transportation Authority, where we’re going to take links in, any one of those links, you’re gonna have to fight a fire because there’s gonna be a lot of people, there’s gonna, you know, and hopefully they never have to fight a fire, but that means there’s going to be a hydrant, there’s going to need to be high pressure water, which when you go along those corridors, you quickly realize that doesn’t exist. And so the intersection of growing foods, intensely growing, fighting fires and all the other industrial on top of making sure people will be healthy when they drink water is just an enormous challenge for this small utility block on the Monopoly board.

Stefan Leslie 9:44
So, can you describe what some of those main research areas are?

Graham Gagnon 9:49
Yeah so, Halifax water I remember distinctly, fortunately, I was in a plant with the Director of Water Operations and we were driving for about an hour or so, I had to his ears for about an hour. And he described some of the, you know, I want to do this, and then I want to do this, and then I want to do this. And he described it in the manner that like I see this is going to be about a month, and this is going to be about a month, and this could be a month. And this particular problem relates to disinfection byproducts, because the utility had some challenges with disinfection byproducts, and he’s like, great, we’re gonna do this in three years, we’re going to start it and by year one, we’ll have the solution, year two, we’ll implement and then year three we’ll validate. And I said, Yeah, that will work out perfectly. So fast forward to Wendy’s point, 18 years, we’re still working on the same problem. And because so many different things have changed, you know, from, you know, climate impacts, to process changes, to chemical changes, personnel changes, there’s so many different nuances that happen that, you know, but I think so to come back to that story is that oftentimes a research receptor or partner has acuteness in their mind, but then once they like, you know, any curious individual, and certainly the director and the general manager, fortunate were very curious, they weren’t like why isn’t this answered? They were very much wow, we didn’t know that, well, why don’t you go down this hallway and see what happens there. And, and then once you start to do that, you then realize some of the challenges that exist. I would say, to no operational fault, but just we hadn’t thought about that, you know, we hadn’t looked at the problem from this angle. And so, there’s many examples that we could probably get into that will describe, you know, various opportunities that, you know, on the one hand, it would be a challenge that we’d see at the plant, or in operation, and then the opportunity would be brought from us from, from students or from research to say, well, why don’t we look at the problem this way, as opposed to solving this, you know, flicking a valve or hoping for the best type of solution.

Stefan Leslie 12:15
So, there is certainly something about utilities or water, the provision of water and research that really lends itself well to this idea of this back and forth between problems that are identified in society, and what are the key ingredients to enable this kind of model to happen?

Graham Gagnon 12:33
What is perhaps unique from individual relationships that we have with organizations is very much trust and trust, not just, as I said, a meeting with the executive team and me, doesn’t kind of just stop, like, I’ll run back and tell my lab. My expectation is that I can talk to the you know, the student or person that is working at a pilot plant and say, this is what I’ve learned, this is what I think, and they can then talk to the operator at that very same plant, and have the same shared values that I had in a conversation with the executive. In other words, we all have the same mission, we all share the same purpose and which I think is vital, that we can’t just think about it as, you know, two talking heads at the top of an organization agreeing, but all the way through that folks are agreeing and aligning with. In a partnership, it’s not like a secret. In my lab, there are no locks on cabinets and that is on purpose. They don’t want secret research, I want to make sure if we’re going to have this industrial collaboration that the industry partners can see, fairly acutely, our mistakes and where we’re thinking this is leading. And also, then say, well, are you sure that’s going to be where it’s leading, maybe you should also think about this.

Wendy Krkosek 14:13
If I could take it one step further to and you know, the word partnership, and that’s truly what this research is. It’s a partnership, and we’ve grown to understand each other’s needs and businesses, and develop that sort of trust in the relationships. And it’s an understanding of what the needs are of the other organization as well. So, you know, we have this sort of contractual research relationship, and there are outcomes that Graham needs to publish papers, his students need to publish papers. Sometimes the stuff that he works on, we’re like, well, really does that, you know, how does that really impact us? But that’s all a part of it because that’s the novel, that’s the academic, that’s what you get the funding for. But then on the other side, it’s we have these operational questions that are maybe not all that exciting to students, but that all gets done as part of this partnership. So, it’s really understanding each other and what the requirements and needs are, and being flexible and able to accommodate that. I think you know, where things can fail is if a research partnership is established, and there’s very specific outcomes, and the research isn’t shared throughout the process, and it isn’t collaborative, and then, you know, here’s the paper, and then we’re done, and we move on and that’s kind of kind of the end of it. But it’s really that integration and understanding how the different organizations work together and what the needs are and working together to ensure that all of those needs are met.

Stefan Leslie 15:38
So, it’s a very different model than having research occur, and then finding a way at the end of it to find people who can make use of it, it sounds to me very much like at the outset, participation, integration, partnership, all those words that you’ve been using, to define what those issues are, and then recognize that research is going to both solve immediate problems that the client or the sponsor or the user partner needs, but also be able to pursue these broader longer term deeper questions, that may actually help problems that you are going to confront in 10 years time or someone else may be confronting.

Wendy Krkosek 16:17
That’s right, and I think, you know, a great example of this is the research that we’ve done on lead and corrosion control. You know, Graham’s students started working on this in the late 2000s. And so, by 2011, 2012, we had a wealth of data on, you know, corrosion control, treatment and lead service lines and how this situation really impacts our community and our systems. This is all at a time that things are kind of starting to escalate in the US, we have the Flint Water Crisis in 2015, and at that point, we were so well positioned, because of the research that had been ongoing, and the discussions that we’ve had, that we knew the situation, we knew the problem, and we were able, and we already had the kind of plan in place to get to the solutions, because we’d been talking throughout that whole process and kind of had been on that forefront of we know this is a problem, we need to address it, how do we address this effectively?

Stefan Leslie 17:08
It sounds to me that it’s almost you need to be both willing to teach and willing to learn from both sides, like everyone involved has to, there is no teacher and student here, there is no client and service provider, this really is a kind of an integration of those functions, recognizing that you have different needs and different capacities, but for it all to work, those things have to be structured together.

Wendy Krkosek 17:33
Absolutely. And we have students that work directly in our facilities, you know, that are in our pilot plants that are interacting with operators on a daily basis. So, they’re integrated into the utility structure. And that gives them an understanding of what our needs are, and what actually drives us as an organization, which then allows them to tailor their research to be able to answer those questions that we need. And we have postdocs that that come and sit, you know, in my group, and they’ve got an access card to our buildings, and they come to the group meetings, and they see their research, but they also see everything else, which then gives them that perspective of how do we take that back and provide value?

Graham Gagnon 18:08
Yeah, it’s pretty exciting. And to Wendy’s point, you know, I think it was two weeks ago, we had a PhD student who was working on a technology that doesn’t exist right now in Halifax Water, give a research seminar to water operators at the plant saying this is what I’m doing in this pilot plant. This is what I hope to achieve. This is how this technology works. And I find it, I found it great in that you know, it’s not me, and it’s not Wendy saying, Wendy telling the operators, you need to listen to this or me telling the grad student you need to say these things, but very much shared learning and operators asking questions of the, and it happens, sometimes very planned, like in that situation, and sometimes very organically, which is both are really, really useful.

Stefan Leslie 19:01
Yeah, I just wanted to ask you about the astonishing growth that we’ve seen in Nova Scotia and certainly around the Halifax area that you serve, how does that fit into the planning process for being able to deliver water supply and wastewater away and the distribution network for stormwater?

Wendy Krkosek 19:19
So it’s all part of the process. But it’s, you know, we’re growing into areas where we don’t necessarily have water provision at the moment. And so, I think we’re just in the very early stages of starting to ask those questions and starting to look at how we’re going to provide those services in the future. You know, we have teams of people that are constantly looking at this looking at development, but really the times are very different than the way we’ve conducted business in the past. So, it’s just staying closely connected to you know, HRM, to the province on what the plans are and how we can best support those plans.

Stefan Leslie 19:58
And, Graham the work on water, of course is broader than just what’s relevant for a utility. A large part of this province is on well water, either dug or drilled using a septic system rather than a communal sewer network and stormwater management is probably called the yard in most cases. So how does the work that the centre, how does that work become relevant? Or how is it applied or useful to those who are outside of the utility system?

Graham Gagnon 20:26
When we were starting, and I would try to coerce students to think about water as a career. It probably goes back to my days of teaching civil engineering students. And early in my career, I realized that most civil engineer students go into civil engineering because they want to build a bridge, build a road, or build a house, all things they can see. And all of those things require water, you don’t build a house, and then say, well, I hope for the best on the water and wastewater side, or you don’t build a road and say, well, I hope there’s a stormwater system that that will convey the rainwater that’s inevitably going to come off this asphalt. It’s intrinsically tied to this. And so, if we think about the current discussions around housing, in our province, and in our country, a key part of that is going to be water and wastewater in that many of our, I think it’s 40% of our homeowners, you know, say pre 2016, were on some form of well, 60% are on some form of septic. That is a crazy number to think about 60%, and knowing where a population is going. So, you know, we get phone calls right now for many of our neighboring counties, from HRM, that are really challenged by population growth, because they, on the side of water, they can approve a four storey or six storey, multi res building, and then they go ah, well, we thought we would drill a hole in the ground and find water, turns out we don’t find it. Or we realized that the septic approval was too tight, and we have no place to put our wastewater from this multi res building. So, it is a challenge that on the one hand, I see this as exciting because it allows the talents that we have in the centre allows the talents that exist in Halifax Water and many of the service providers that exist in our province to really think about how do we solve this?

Stefan Leslie 22:48
So, I guess when you think about it in that way, although the problem may be framed as an engineering challenge, really, it’s the social dimension that is giving it shape. It’s the population growth, it’s the distribution where people are living, what their evolving needs are, what their expectations around decarbonisation, and so on might be. So how do you work as a group of engineers, our primarily engineers? How do you find the space to work with the other sorts of disciplines in order to comprehensively address the problems that’s actually going to solve the issues that are confronted by utility or others?

Graham Gagnon 23:22
Yeah, I mean, that’s a great question, I would say, you can engage with the public, engage with leaders to learn from them. And, you know, I’ve been fortunate to sit on the roundtable for the environment in our province, and, you know, our different ministers and have, similarly, you know, I just want to make sure we have safe water I just want to make, and then you kind of peel that back and try to learn what the minister or what the minister staff is thinking about when they say safe water, because it’s surprising, what individuals, what communities, how they interpret that, because that will then as an engineer, inform, okay, well, this is the solution, or this is the approach you’re asking me to take.

Stefan Leslie 24:15
So, where do you see the direction of the centre going in the future to address these sorts of things? It doesn’t have to be grand new problems. It may be just that we continue to have communities that don’t have safe drinking water, and that remains a challenge, but can you talk to or speak to the where the research direction is going to go with as best as you can anticipate it?

Graham Gagnon 24:34
Yeah, I mean, we’ve touched on climate change. I think inevitably, climate change is going to have a profound effect on Nova Scotians in a wide variety of living conditions and working conditions, and water will be important. You know, from sea level rise, we’ve worked with communities that have their wastewater plant below sea level now, and so as the sea level rises, you know, how is this plant really going to function and where is water gonna go because the pressure of the sea is going to be far greater than any pump we could imagine. We have researchers that are studying the interaction between the oceans and the groundwater systems, the freshwater systems, and we can see that infiltration is happening. We have a project with the Town of Yarmouth and a researcher that is looking at drought conditions in Yarmouth that are brought on from climate change. With Halifax Water, we are looking at water quality changes that are brought on through climate change. And then on the wastewater side, we’re looking at mitigating energy to adapt to climate change, lowering the burden of climate change impacts from treatment processes. So, I see all of these sort of intersectionalities are going to be happening in Nova Scotia, and probably projects that I can’t even begin to imagine. And then, as I’ve, as I’ve said to Wendy, and anybody who wants to hear it, you know, the intersection between energy and water has always been there, whether, you know, as a mineral producing nation, the oil and gas sector knows that when we purify oil for consumption, we produce water. From a biofuels standpoint, if we want to when we were in the ethanol days, we were realizing how much water we were using to produce corn. And so, as we now move into hydrogen, and people say, well, we want green hydrogen, and the source is water, you begin to realize how much water that that will be, how clean that water will have to be to produce hydrogen, and where will that water come from? Who will be the steward of it? Who will regulate that? What will be the utility that will manage that, it’s just so many questions that I think are important, because you know, every time we think about water and energy, it really then starts to question all of the primary uses of water drinking, cooking, recreating, well, how much do we want to move over to energy? And that sort of tension point. So I think all and probably more are going to be on the horizon for CWRS researchers in the future.

Stefan Leslie 27:47
So, you’re not bored?

Graham Gagnon 27:48
Not bored.
Stefan Leslie 27:49
Not likely to be anytime soon. So for the 40 students or so that you have in your lab, they have an ongoing set of tasks to take on. So where do they tend to go and work? Where’s their destination? Do they stay as researchers within the academic sector, or are they working for utilities?

Graham Gagnon 28:08
You could imagine, on the one hand, we’re feeding a sort of regional ecosystem over the last, you know, several decades that we have a large number of engineers that work for Halifax Water, which wouldn’t be surprising. We have a large number of engineers that get hired to local consultancy firms in the region. And we have engineers and scientists that now work for the provincial government, which is really wonderful in that you can kind of from a problem, identification, ownership standpoint, as a graduate student, you could go well, I worked on this problem and now I can work for the utility, or now I can work as the service provider to advise the utility or now I can regulate the utility, but they have a really clear knowledge of, you know, the challenges that, you know, it’s not gonna be just box checking, and it’s going to be, let’s negotiate and sort this out over a period of time. But we also what probably the most proud is that we have produced and not because I’m an academic, but because it’s important to me that we think about gender and think about women, particularly in engineering because graduation rates for women are astonishingly low compared to other sectors. So, our lab has supported about a 50% graduation rate for women, which is incredible in engineering. And of those women, 10 are now faculty members, two are Canada Research Chairs, one’s a department chair, one’s an endowed chair, so they’re all having impact across the various classrooms, labs, engagements that really pleased me because obviously that’s an important leadership function for training future leaders.

Wendy Krkosek 29:59
If I could just add a little bit there too, you know, we talked about the evolution of the research and how it sort of went from prescribed research into being sort of a give and take, and in both directions, but I think there’s also some, a lot of the majority of the benefits that we get out of the research partnership that we have are actually not related to the research outcomes. It’s related to this network that now exists. And you know, people across the country and across North America now have context in Atlantic Canada and understand where we’re coming from, and we can pick up the phone, we can talk to those folks. We’ve trained people, we’ve hired people. And so, it’s built this community up in Atlantic Canada and across Canada, that’s now you know, our knowledge of water has been elevated. And that in and of itself is such a huge benefit to us as utility, but also to others in the area. So, I think it’s, you know, the outcome of that network. And I also want to just comment, Graham said 40 to 50 students in the lab. But if you actually extrapolate that over the past 15 to 18 years, at 45 to 50 per year, we’re looking at hundreds of students from undergrad to grad to postdoc that have been trained through this research partnership that now have their fingers sort of across the water industry.

Stefan Leslie 31:17
Including you.

Wendy Krkosek 31:18
Including me.

Stefan Leslie 31:20
So one good outcome.

Wendy Krkosek 31:23
I won’t complain.

Stephanie Reid 31:28
As you heard by involving Halifax Water and community partners from the beginning, by listening to and valuing various voices, and creating intentional research programs based on specific outcomes identified by the needs of society, Dr. Graham Gagnon and his team play a critical role in water management. This partnership has been successful in finding solutions to challenges in water quality water treatment, and stormwater management that can be applied beyond their own community.

We hope you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to hit the subscribe button and leave us five stars. You can also follow us on Instagram at Beyond Research Podcast and let us know what research topics you would like to hear on the podcast. Thank you for listening, and we’ll see you next time.