The City of Monmouth has a highly integrated Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, or SCADA, system that monitors and controls the clean water and wastewater distribution. This system dates back to 2005 and has seen minimal updating. Under a current capital improvement for the city, the SCADA system is being completely updated to bring the entire city onto a common system. Woodard and Curran Senior Client Manager Jennifer Anders explains:
“Essentially this is a comprehensive upgrade of the control system for the water and wastewater systems across the whole city. So this is for all of your water plants, your municipal wastewater plant, and the industrial wastewater plant out at Smithfield. It is upgrading the control systems with all of those. More importantly, it is bringing them onto a common system, which will help the city with maintenance of it going forward and also help significantly with security. I’m sure everyone is aware of cyber security has become a key topic in the industry and just really around the world in general. So this allows the city to be able to implement a more secure system.”
In addition to the cyber security, Anders informs this updated SCADA system replaces obsolete software and hardware, along with upgraded capabilities of data storage and tablet use for the operation staff. The total for this upgrade is $629,000 and has been approved by City Council.
