Drinking Water Infrastructure Management in the Village of St. Charles

Neil Noack (right) overseeing the hydro-excavation process as the existing water service is being exposed for verification.

For over 100 years, the Village of St. Charles has provided drinking water to its residents.

Like many communities in the region, the Village began with wooden water pipes. Upgrades, improvements, and additions have taken place since then and now the Village provides drinking water services to more than 860 customers, including residents, businesses, schools, municipal buildings, and an assisted living facility.

“It is a very important service – probably the most important service that we provide,” St. Charles Village Manager Hartmann Aue said.

Now, the Village’s water distribution system includes 19 miles of water main and a 250,000-gallon water tank. Portions of the water system that were built in the 1920s remain in operation today and in 2019, the Village began working with Spicer Group to develop an asset management plan for the entire system to continue to provide a high level of service, comply with new regulations from the State of Michigan, and replace any lead service lines within the system.

New state regulations enhanced drinking water requirements and mandated the removal and replacement of lead service lines in all municipalities. In 2020, the state announced grants and loans available through the Michigan Clean Water Plan for communities to assist with projects needed to comply with these new state regulations.

Spicer Group assisted the Village with applying for this grant money and the Village was awarded $397,000 to develop a drinking water asset management plan.

“We’d had success with grants in the past, so it was something the Village jumped on as soon as we saw it,” Aue said. “Without this funding, the Village probably would not have been able to comply with the lead and copper rule of having our distribution service materials inventoried by 2025 as required. It is very costly and would’ve been a huge burden on the Village and the taxpayers.”

With the Drinking Water Asset Management (DWAM) funding in place, one of the first steps in the Village’s grant project was to inventory 20 percent of the water services used to connect to residences and conduct a materials inventory on these assets. Determining the location and type of materials used in these assets allows the Village to build the state-required database. Spicer Group designed a project that would both meet these requirements and be minimally invasive to residents.

For this portion of the project, Spicer Group inspectors worked with a contractor and Village staff to find and verify the location and material used in the drinking water services at three locations at residences – the public and private side of the water shutoff valve at the right-of-way, and the connection inside the residence.

The Village and Spicer Group chose to use the method of hydro-excavation to verify the water service materials. Hydro-excavation is the process of removing soil with pressurized water and vacuum suction. The soil is removed and transferred into a debris tank. This process is less intrusive and has less impact on the surrounding area.

“With this process, there isn’t a large piece of equipment like an excavator or backhoe digging and tearing in the earth. This process works well around existing utilities,” Spicer Group Project Engineer Mitch Jacqmain, E.I.T., said. “The overall impact is a lot smaller than what it would be to go out and conventionally excavate.

For this project, Spicer Group created a digital form using Survey123 that an inspector would fill out at each location while the work was being done, tracking the service materials, and capturing photos of the service once they are exposed and identified. St. Charles has been using this, along with the data-driving application Field Maps, side-by-side to complete the objectives outlined by the DWAM Grant. Using Field Maps allows the Village to map water shut-off locations and enter the water services data into their GIS system.

Uploading to the Village’s GIS system creates visuals that show and analyze which areas may have high concentrations of galvanized or lead lines. The Village will continue to utilize this method to advance its asset inventory until they have reached a complete distribution system materials inventory (CDSMI) by January 2025 as outlined by EGLE.

“This provides us the opportunity to start planning on how we’re going to move forward with the other parts of the lead and copper rule, which is replacing the lead service lines,” Aue said. “This also fits into the big picture plan of replacing decades-old water mains within our overall water system improvement plan. It is a very important piece of the puzzle.”

For the rest of the year, Spicer Group will use this information and continue to collect more data on the Village’s drinking water system, including infrastructure condition and risk assessment, to develop the Village’s drinking water asset management plan.