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[Music]
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[Music]
pixis
to scaling up h2o the podcast where we
scale up on knowledge so we
don’t scale up our systems my name is
trace blackmore
your host for scaling up h2o
a nation back on episode 186 and 187
where
connor parrish interviewed me
he asked me one of the questions about
why do i do
this show and it’s simple i love
this industry this industry has been
outstanding for me to have a career in i
learned about it from my father this
industry has helped me
with my relationship with my father and
because
we had the relationship within the water
treatment industry
that helped all other things within our
relationship and of course my father’s
not here anymore
so if it wasn’t for water treatment i
don’t think i ever would have made the
connection
with my dad if i were not in this
industry so i can thank water treatment
for that
water treatment has given me a lifestyle
where i’ve been able
to meet people that i would have never
met before many of you out there
listening
i consider friends because we’ve met
we’ve maybe even shared dinner and now
we call each other from time to time to
help each other with
issues that we’re having i can go on and
on and on
about how much water treatment being in
the industry
has meant to me but i reflect back on
the question that connor asked
me and my mission is to raise the bar
in the water treatment industry as i
said
water treatment has been so good to me
i want to return that to the industry
it’s my hope that each and every episode
that we bring you
here at the scaling up h2o team that
that helps
elevate you maybe you learn something
maybe you’re just
thinking about something a little bit
differently
but it’s my hope that this podcast
is the catalyst to help you become a
better water treater
and enjoy the industry that you are
serving in
so if you have any ideas of how i can do
that
better please let me know if
you’ve got some comments where you think
we are doing a great job of that
and you want to acknowledge something
that you learned from the show i’d love
to hear
that too anytime you have any comments
about the show
i would love for you to go to our show
ideas page
and that’s scaling up h2o.com and
navigate over to the show ideas
there you can either record your voice
or
you can write down what you have in the
form
but folks something that also helps us
out
and helps us reach other water treaters
other professionals in our industry is
your comments on the social media
platforms that you’re listening to this
podcast
so if you could take a second and write
a comment
about what this podcast
has done for you what the podcast meant
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what are some actions that you’ve taken
anything that you want to share
the podcast services really rely
heavily on those comments and what they
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they make the podcast more findable is
that a word findable when people search
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and that way we’re able to grow the
scaling up nation
something that i’ve received tremendous
comments over
people saying that they can’t wait for
the next
james’s challenge because they know
they’re becoming a better water treater
each challenge each week so here is
another
james’s challenge
[Music]
hello scaling up nation the next james’s
challenge as we grow as an industrial
water treatment professional
drop by drop is
dig through the awt website at
www.awt.org for resources
awt stands for the association of water
technologies
they have a ton of resources available
on their website developed by volunteers
that make the awt the vibrant
organization that it is
even if you aren’t a member there’s
still a lot there to find
perhaps start under the resources menu
and move on from there
be sure to share your experience on
linkedin by tagging it with hashtag jc21
and hashtag scalinguph2o
this is james mcdonald and i look
forward to seeing what you share
nation there it is your next james’s
challenge
for all of you that have posted what
you’ve been doing in completion of
james’s challenge
thank you for that please continue doing
that for those of you that are wondering
how you do that just like james said
hashtag
jc21 and hashtag scalingup
h2o that way we can all share in your
success we can
learn how you’re taking the challenge
and applying that
and that’s going to spark some other
ideas in somebody else
a rising tide raises all boats we’re all
learning from each other
so i appreciate everybody doing that
seattle nation i just want to get
straight to the interview i’m so excited
i know we’re going to learn today i know
we’re going to challenge the way
we are already thinking about certain
items
so nation please welcome our returning
guest
chris nagle of avapco
[Music]
my lab partner today is returning guest
chris nagle of avapco chris so excited
to have you back on scaling up h2o and
welcome
well thanks trace i’m excited to be back
on scaling up h2o so thanks for inviting
me
and before we jump into today’s topic
i’d like to
go back to our episode 37 we did
together on white rust and passivation
because i noticed when i listened to the
podcast that i
had one misspeak or misspoke at about
the 1016 mark
and we were talking about the hot dip
galvanize process for coils
and i incorrectly said that the base
battle
for galvanized coils was stainless steel
we do make 304 and 316 stainless steel
coils
but they are not the coils that get hot
dip galvanized so the
the underlying steel for hot dip
galvanized coils is actually carbon
steel
uh fortunately nobody’s called me on it
but i do want to clear that up since i
have one technical glitch the last time
around i figured we’d get that out of
the way and move on to today’s topic
well we appreciate that you know that
happens i’ll
have something very clear in my head and
somehow when it comes out of my mouth
and goes through this microphone
it’s not what i intended to say although
in in your case you know you didn’t get
a call normally i get dozens of calls
and emails and hey
blackmore what are you thinking and in
case nation
you have not listened to episode 37 we
did that all the way back in
april of 2018 that was a fantastic
episode
where you told us all things about white
rust
and i would say it’s one of our most
listened to episodes
it’s one of the episodes that people
said that has helped them
the most because what you did you really
explained the phenomenon that was going
on
and you gave it from your perspective
and i have to say i said this in that
episode i’ll say it again
i have worked with a lot of people that
make equipment i have
never worked with somebody that has the
water treatment experience that you do
and has the desire to bring
the equipment and the water
technologists together to make sure that
we’re working as a partnership
and in that episode you showed us
exactly how to explain these items to
the customer
how to give them better information so
they can make better decisions and
i i want to thank you for that because
that was a great episode and
i guess also thank you for all the great
things that you’re doing to make sure
that we as water treaters understand the
equipment better
and all the cool things that you’re
doing there at avatco
well thanks that’s very kind of you
we’re excited
to you know be a quality equipment
manufacturer but also have a water
systems team
so hopefully today i’ll do the same
thing hopefully we can think about
evaporative cooling in the context of
legionella bacteria and legionnaires
disease and maybe think about it
differently than a
somebody that’s a specialist in
microbiology
or an academic might think about it and
really
take the concepts of what the water
treatment professional is treating
and how they’re doing it and the system
that they’re actually taking care of
well you brought up evaporative cooling
and
back on episode 137 and 138 we had brett
alexander
also of evapco come in and educate
the entire scaling up nation that
everything is not a cooling tower
and he did a great job with that i know
i have the habit of calling things a
cooling tower just from being
in our side of the industry for so long
and i thought i got out of that habit
because you’ve helped me brett’s helped
me and i’ve tried to educate the scaling
up nation
i was hosting a hang and somebody was
talking about a fluid cooler
and i called it a cooling tower and
almost
everybody on that call said you need to
listen to episode 137-138 because you’re
not doing what brett told you to do
well it just shows that uh you’re
educating the nation
and we’re making progress together it is
interesting
coming from a water treatment background
and then coming to an equipment company
the number of our water treatment
partners and people that i
meet at awt that’ll call for an opinion
on something and they’ll say we’re
treating a cooling tower
and i always kind of stop there and say
okay let’s make sure we’re
treating a cooling tower when you think
about
cooling equipment obviously there’s dry
coolers which wouldn’t need water
treatment other than the closed loop
but when we think about other types that
we would
be thinking about from a water treatment
standpoint
there’s really four types and if we
think about them alphabetically it would
be
adiabatic which are gaining popularity
what i would call closed circuit core or
you just referred to as a fluid core
uh you could use either term there
there’s also evaporative condensers
and then there’s the open cooling towers
and i like to say open cooling towers
because it helps people understand that
the water
that’s going through the tower is also
going into the building and serving a
function
at a plate and frame heat exchanger or a
chiller
so it’s one big open loop that’s
rejecting the heat
when we talk about the closed circuit
coolers or the evaporative condensers
they tend to have a coil or they have a
coil
and inside the coil is either water or a
glycol water mixture that’s going back
to serve the process in the building
so the spray water for a cooler or
uh fluid core is a much smaller higher
turnover so that has implications for
which biocides we might pick
how we might set up our feeding control
and then the other
category is the evaporative condenser
and evaporative condensers
look just like a cooler or fluid core
the difference being on what’s inside
the coil
so instead of that water or water glycol
mix
now we have a refrigerant usually
ammonia but there are other refrigerants
so that can also uh be useful
information for a water treatment
professional because
compared to a fluid cooler or closed
circuit cooler the skin temperature at
the top of the coil the condenser
tends to be much higher so we want to
think about that when we’re selecting
our inhibitors and our cycles of
concentration and those kind of things
yeah it’s great information and if we’re
telling you exactly
what it is that we’re treating equipment
wise then you’re able to give us better
information so we’re just communicating
better together
correct and and when we stop thinking of
everything as a cooling tower
we can fine-tune our programs
and think in terms of how the water is
actually
being used in that process and it’s
really no different than if you have a
an open cooling tower at a hospital
is maybe treated differently than an
open cooling tower at a power plant or a
refinery right
so they’re all variations but it’s
important for the water treatment
professional to think about
what is this equipment i’m actually
treating let’s get the right name so
that we can communicate effectively and
get the right
program so nation you heard it here if
you have not listened to
episode 137 and 138 prepare to be
educated so we can communicate better i
want to say
it was about this time last year you
called me and said you were thinking
about submitting an abstract to present
at the awt conference
and you had read a lot of information
you knew that there was a voice that
wasn’t getting heard
and you thought you could be that voice
so
today i thought we could talk about the
actual presentation
that you gave at the awt but i wanted to
start out
with the mindset that you were concerned
that people were going to have as you
were presenting
so do you mind telling us about that
sure and i i wouldn’t necessarily frame
it as i was
concerned but it was kind of interesting
to me that so many people
were focusing so much attention on
evaporative cooling equipment
in terms of legionella bacteria and
legionnaires disease
almost to the exclusion of other water
systems so
when i started interacting with some
regulators
and reading some documents that were out
there that were referencing
other papers and other documents it kind
of started me on this quest that well
it’s cited here i’m gonna go find that
paper and actually read that paper and
see what that paper says and then
that leads you down a bit of a rabbit
hole so
when i was thinking about it i was
thinking about again in terms of water
treatment professional what do they need
to know
or what might they be interested in
learning about
to bring value to their customer when we
think in terms
of a program team for ashrae 188
and what you find when you read all this
information
is there are a lot of kind of flags that
have been put in the ground
that aren’t necessarily based on data or
technical fact they’re just
markers that somebody put in the ground
so
that’s fine if if we know they work but
it’s a bit of a slippery slope if we
start copying and pasting from
one regulation to the next or we start
making assumptions about things
based on what somebody else had said or
what they do in another part of the
country right so i really wanted to take
a step back and look at the history of
it
and also uh take that with the knowledge
of the equipment that we just discussed
that everything is in a cooling tower
and come up with some
things that a water treatment
professional might either want to read
on their own
or think about as they work with their
customers
to minimize risk from all building water
systems
i think it’s safe to say that when the
layman
knows anything about legionella the
first thing that they think of
is the cooling tower and a couple years
ago we had an incident here in atlanta
and i remember the newscaster standing
outside of a generator
reporting on the cooling tower that she
thought was behind her
so how do we fix that well i think
that through data and through sharing
data
and through education i mean the media
is a tough situation right because
they’re following what’s been reported
on in the past and as you said they may
may or may not even know what the
cooling tower is
the atlanta one’s a great example
because
the reading i’ve done on it most of the
people
if not all the people that had disease
were traced to being near an ornamental
fountain in the hotel
yet when you read about it you read that
legionelle was found in the ornamental
fountain
and in the cooling tower right so one of
the things to keep in mind is
just because we find legionella in a
cooling tower doesn’t mean
that that’s the source of disease right
and
that’s a perfect example of if we don’t
have a whole building
all water system endpoint mindset
we could go find that legionella in the
cooling tower and assume
that that’s the source of the disease
when in fact in that particular case it
likely wasn’t
chris why do you think that legionella
is synonymous with cooling towers
well that’s a great question and i think
we have to go back in time
and as you probably know and most of the
nation probably know
legionnaires disease got its name from a
convention in philadelphia
in 1976 at what was then the bellevue
stratford hotel
and much like our current world covid
situation this was a new disease
cdc knew they were looking for something
but they didn’t know what they were
looking for
and it was pretty exhaustive research
effort by the cdc and others
to to figure it out and and they found
this new bacteria
wasn’t really new bacteria it was new to
the scientific
water treatment community and they had a
problem in that there were three
legionnaires who went to the convention
and were in the hotel
that passed away unfortunately from the
disease but there was also somebody
on broad street near the hotel that
passed away unfortunately from the
disease but wasn’t part of the
convention and hadn’t been
in that hotel so even though legionella
bacteria was not found in the cooling
tower
one of the speculations was it was
aerosolized from the cooling tower
and that’s where the disease came from
and given what was known at the time was
probably a
reasonable theory and i think that
started the train
on the tracks of when you have this
disease go look at the cooling towers
more recently i think it was 2016. i’d
have to get the exact paper for you
there was a plus one article where some
people
took samples from that time from the
people that had passed away
and did more modern dna studies on it
and what they found was
that the people in the hotel and the
person on on
broad street both had zero group one
legionella but they were related but
different strains
so that goes back to the concept that
it it’s possible that that initial
outbreak wasn’t
one single outbreak that there were
actually multiple sources which is
not that uncommon when you think about
major cities
and the distributed water systems that
we’re dealing with in major cities these
days
so the government’s gotten involved all
over the world and they say
that we need regulations to help protect
people
so other people’s fate isn’t like the
people you just described in
in the last scenario my question is
can we give credit to those regulations
for reducing
legionnaires disease in those areas well
for the paper the awt paper and
the presentation for the virtual
conference which i thought was very good
given the
environment awt had to work with last
fall i focus primarily
on two sets of regulations the first is
the french regulation of cooling towers
and that goes back to
an outbreak that occurred in 2003 end of
2003 beginning of 2004
and the french government uh started
some regulations of cooling towers
at that time so we have about 10 years
of data
to look at in the case of france and
regulation of just
evaporative cooling systems and what
that data shows
is the regulations have not produced a
meaningful reduction in disease
in the case of france we looked at
cases per 100 000 population and there’s
some graphs in the paper
but the short story there is that
the trend really hasn’t gone down since
those
regulations were enacted we also took a
look at the more recent new york city
regulation of cooling towers and that
was following several outbreaks that
occurred in new york city in 2015
and during one of the outbreaks which
was in the july to august time frame of
2015
new york city’s health department
suggested registration
regulation of cooling towers as a way to
reduce
legionnaires disease in the city that
regulation was passed quite quickly
and we have about four years of data
following that and in the case of new
york city
the four years before so 2014
they were averaging about 200 cases per
year in the city
and the four years since which would be
2016
to 2019 if my math is correct they’re
actually up to about 450 cases per year
so the regulations which are quite
direct in telling water treatment people
how to do their job
have not reduced disease disease is
increasing
not decreasing in new york city could it
be that it stayed the same it’s just
more people are looking for it so
there’s more testing being done
certainly you could say that there’s if
there’s more emphasis on testing
whether it be covet or legionella or
anything else we’re going to find
more cases so that’s certainly possible
and
i wouldn’t say that it’s impossible for
a cooling tower to be
the source of a legionella outbreak we
know that given the right conditions
that could occur
i think what it’s saying is even if we
say we’re testing or we’re looking for
it more
the regulations aren’t helping us go
down right so
if all these uh disease cases were
related to evaporative cooling equipment
and if we put in very stringent
requirements on
disinfections testing low action levels
then we should see either a
stabilization or a decrease
right and that’s not what the data shows
and i think that makes sense because if
we think about it
what’s the most likely way that
legionella bacteria gets into the
fountain
in the hotel in atlanta or
into a building water system in new york
city and the answer to that is the
distributed water system
right so the problem with
the distributed water system is if you
test
once a month most of the time you’re not
going to find anything
because the release in a distributed
system is going to be due to an upset
condition or a change condition right so
i refer to it as a seating event and
it’s not going on all the time
so we go look for it we don’t find it we
go look for it we don’t find it
i think awt’s uh cooling tower committee
is doing some interesting work on that
because they have some people that are
actually going and looking at the source
water
and i think if you do that exercise see
is
that it is in new york city’s potable
water system
it’s not always in the water system um
and all these endpoints are essentially
spots for it to amplify
and then be released and have somebody
inhale it or aspirate it the cdc data
supports that
most of the cases come from the
distributive water system
but if we look at the law that was
passed in new york there
there’s nothing that covers that if it
was written again today do you think
that
that would have been included it’s hard
to know there is
more work going on in that area in some
other states
and i can’t say that i’ve kept up with
all the legislation i know at the time
and
and you can almost have empathy for the
people at the health department right we
got this outbreak it’s the middle of the
summer
we think it’s cooling towers let’s go do
something quick with the cooling towers
to get it under control
the city actually stated the health
department stated that
the city water wasn’t uh affected i
believe was the term they used by
legionella
bacteria which is clearly not the case
but
they were very focused on not looking at
the city water at that time
i think as we go forward and more
situations like the regulations show
that just
looking at cooling towers isn’t
effective at bringing down the rate of
disease
there’s going to be a more thoughtful
implementation of a broader approach as
suggested in nashua 188.
i hope you’re right because i know a lot
of cities are considering legislation
like this
and they’re using new york as the
example right and that’s kind of what
got me into this whole
read papers and look at sighted works
was
i was working with the folks in the city
of vancouver
and they were modeling their proposals
somewhat on new york city and
fortunately for vancouver they have a
much lower incidence rate
than new york city and that makes sense
it’s a newer city the
infrastructure isn’t as old and
it was almost the mindset of well it may
not be
effective but if it you know stops an
outbreak then it’s worth it
and i think everybody in the nation
would agree that we don’t want more
disease and we don’t want more outbreaks
but as you mentioned the cdc has said
for years
that most of the disease is not outbreak
related it’s sporadic
right so if we want to get at the big
number most of the
disease we have to start looking more
broadly
at all building water systems and the
supply water coming to the building
so hopefully there’s some regulators
that are listening to this podcast
and they can apply some of the things
that we’re talking about
to hopefully the regulations that they
are
trying to craft right now i want to go
back to
evaporative cooling and you did a
tremendous amount of research
looking at regulations looking at papers
that were written
what were your findings when it came to
evaporative cooling and legionella
well i think the first thing we want to
think about is something called a drift
eliminator
so a drift eliminator is a component
in an evaporatively cooled system not
adiabatic but all the other ones we’ve
talked about
that is placed above the water flow
and below the air discharge so for my
paper
i found a paper by ken hennin and david
wheeler for
cti and i like their definition so i’m
going to
quote that if i may baffles called drift
eliminators
are placed between the nozzles and the
fan to minimize
through inertial impaction the amount of
entrained water droplets
that leave the cooling tower and are
discharged into the atmosphere
that’s their quote so if we think about
it in generic terms the drift
eliminators there
are there to minimize the amount of
recirculating water
that goes out the top of the tower right
so
if we go back to 2003 2004
the french regulations at that time when
they started regulating cooling towers
they called for
drift eliminators that had an efficiency
of
0.01
now whether or not the tower that was
implicated in that outbreak had
that high efficiency of drift eliminator
or not the papers don’t really say it
was an old industrial tower so it’s
possible
it was even worse than that right and if
we
look at many of the cited works where
there’s a clear connection between a
cooling tower and an outbreak
in that time period what we find is
these towers tended to have
zero group one counts in the thousands
whether it was a thousand cfu per
milliliter or up to ten thousand cfu
per milliliter in the french case so one
of the things that the
people that are striving to have one
action level
may not fully understand about cooling
towers is there’s been
great advancement in the design of uh
drift eliminators since that time
so many of these papers are from the you
know 870s 80s and 90s where we would
have these
older drift eliminators capable of 0.01
percent of the recirculation rate
most of the towers that you and your
team or the nation are going to be
treating today
were probably built after the 90s
and since that time drift eliminators
now
are capable of reducing drift to 0.005
percent
or even down to 0.001
so it’s an order of magnitude
improvement in drift eliminator
technology
which results in an order of magnitude
less drift getting out of the tower
and that’s something that we really need
to think about when we’re setting up our
water management plan because if we have
these higher efficiency drift
eliminators
and less water is getting out of the
tower than
uh if there’s any legion of bacteria in
entrained in that drift
getting out of the tower as well the
other
interesting thing when you read some of
the papers by people looking at drift
is the vast majority of drift exiting a
cooling tower
is in droplet sizes that are too large
to be inhaled into the lawn
so if we think about that we now have an
improvement
in drift eliminator technology and we
have
most of the drift coming out of the
tower is
a hundred a thousand times larger than
respirable
now i’m not a doctor but my
understanding is you need something in
the
less than 10 micron and maybe less than
5 micron size to be able to deeply
inhale it into the lungs
and what that tells us is even if we
have a little bit of legionella in a
modern tower not much of it’s getting
out
and the amount that’s getting out
actually has to evaporate to a
respirable
size before it can create any disease so
i think the drift eliminator
and drift eliminator technology is
something that the water treatment guys
really want to think about
because if i was setting control limits
or action levels for a customer’s tower
and i had an
old tower with old drift eliminators i
would probably have a lower
number that i’m going to take action at
than if i had a modern tower with better
drift eliminated
that makes sense i think that makes
perfect sense in fact it got me thinking
back to when i used to train
osha and the the first thing you look
for
when you inspect a facility for osha and
and potential
issues that can hurt people is how do
you mechanically
remove the issue so it’s just totally
out of the equation
and it seems like that’s what you’ve
done here in your paper
we’ve always looked at okay how do we
treat the water
to stop the transmission of legionella
but now we’re looking okay how can we
better equip
the cooling tower the device so it
doesn’t get out of the machine itself
correct and so when we understand that
that the drift rates are so
low and that the droplet sizes are
mostly too large to be inhaled that
gives us some
cushion or comfort that we don’t need to
fall into the crowd
of lower positivity means less outbreaks
it doesn’t
or that you need a very low or
non-detect level to minimize risk
which you don’t but you mentioned also
the cooling
programs right so there’s this business
increase in
eliminator efficiency and technology
so then we might take it to the water
professionals perspective and say
what could i do to mess that up right
and there was also an interesting paper
that came out i’ll have to
dig it up i think it was a cti paper but
they looked at the impact
of surfactants on drift eliminator
performance so this is one of the things
i touched on
for the water treatment community if
we’re feeding
things like surfactants for
biodispersants or even a non-oxidizing
biocide that has
foaming potential we need to do that in
the context of
how are we setting up our feed and
control to make sure we’re not over
feeding
and how are we setting it up based on a
knowledge of how much water is in the
system
and as a young water treatment guy years
ago i made this mistake myself
we had a flat-based non-oxidizer back
then we didn’t use
oxidizers in the cni market we used dual
non-oxidizers
and we had a cloud-based product and i
was feeding it to a cooling tower system
at a hospital
and you know every now and again we give
it a slug and we knew it would foam a
little well
without thinking i put the same slug
into a small
fluid core that was in the courtyard
outside the hospital’s canteen or
restaurant and i want to let you know i
made it snow
in the middle of the summer and the
doctors and nurses were pressed to the
window watching this thing
blow foam all over the courtyard of
course our anti-foam was up on the roof
so we had
quite a bit of time to go get the
antifoam and come back and i
waited in about needy to get the
antifoam into this fluid core
so the the moral of my mistake and the
story is
make sure you understand your system
volume
right an open cooling tower is going to
have more water in it than
a condenser or a cooler with an integral
sump
and we don’t want to be over feeding
products that change the surface tension
of the water
because we may have a negative impact on
the drift eliminator efficiency which
would mean we’d actually be
letting more water out with the
discharge
i have to tell you as a water treater
you know surfactants just play
such an important role in keeping the
the system clean
and you know i’m the math guy for awt so
i can’t put anything into the system
without calculating
how much water we have and are we dosing
that properly
but i want to thank you for allowing the
nation to understand how important that
is and
just because so many ounces works in
system x
it’s not necessarily going to work in
system y
we’re water treaters we need to know how
much water we’re treating
exactly and you know sometimes we learn
through mistakes i certainly did in that
example from when i was a young water
treater and you don’t tend to make those
mistakes
over and over again but i think it is
important for people to think about
program they’re selecting and the
equipment and
making sure that we’re not over feeding
some of those things in a way that’s
going to take away the advantage that we
have with modern drift eliminating
chris is there an amount of let’s say
cfus
of legionella bacteria that’s virtually
impossible
to get out of modern day drift
eliminators
yeah i might phrase it a little bit
differently i think about it in terms of
the drift eliminator discussion we had
to put it into some kind of context for
you if i had
a modern day cooling tower
and i had 500 cfu per milliliter of
legionella in my water
some might say well that’s a high risk i
would say it depends on the zero group
but if we say okay that’s a fair amount
and then we take
an older tower with the less efficient
drift eliminators the ones where the
papers are saying
a thousand to ten thousand will cause an
outbreak
if that older tower had 50 cfus in it
would actually be a higher risk than the
modern tower with the 500 cfus in it
so what we need to understand is
that having very low positive test
results in your tower
shouldn’t have you running from the
building screaming right
low levels are in a modern tower are not
an indicator
of an outbreak or a potential outbreak
so
when i talk to people about it i like dr
miller’s work
from against environmental technology
let me see if i can
environmental safety technologies they
have a legionella report interpretations
and recommendation guide that i find
very
handy because they break down
non-potable
like decorative fountains and cooling
towers and then potable into different
categories and they go from very low
risk
to very high risk in five columns
and they distinguish which i think is
useful between zero group one
which we know where most of the disease
comes from and all the other serum
groups
so to me i find that his moderate risk
low risk and
very low risk if i was in those
categories as a water treater i’d be
very comfortable with
modern cooling equipment certainly if
you start to see
thousands of cfu you want to take some
action
and you and your customer can come up
with where’s the right
break and do we want to consider
non-server group one versus server group
one is dr miller’s work does i’d
encourage you to do that
but every company and every customer is
going to have a different interpretation
of how they want to run their water
management program
well it seems like most of the world has
leaned to
prescribed if i have so much cfus do
this
and if it’s between this and this do
that right
it sounds like that’s something we need
to get away from
so i’m curious how would you evaluate
a cooling tower and what type of
prescriptions would you get
depending on what that cooling tower has
as far as its equipment its drift
laminators
and what would you tell the customer to
do if they were to test positive for a
certain level of
legionella bacteria yeah so you want to
start with that understanding of do i
have a cooler of a condenser do i have a
tower and then you want to go from there
to
is it old and not well maintained or is
it
new and well maintained or is it
somewhere in between
right one of the interesting things
about the water treatment profession
is over the years people almost think
the water treatment guy is running their
plant for them
and in most cases not all i’m sure you
have different examples but in a lot of
cases the water treater is only on site
once a month
right so really the water treater is
there to
provide a service make sure things are
going well and be a double check
not be the maintenance person so i would
evaluate my customers situation on how
well do they take care of their
equipment because that’s
part of it and then how new and modern
is their equipment
if i have new modern equipment and i
have an automated feed and control
system where somebody like trace has
done the calculations and i know i’m
feeding the right amounts
low and to me if i have a zero group one
reading of less than 100 i’m not
getting very excited about it you know
there’s some great articles
in the uh analyst technical supplement
from 2013 where people that are smarter
about legionella testing than i am
talk about the problems with precision
accuracy and repeatability in that
testing
right so over my career i’ve done split
sampling and sent samples to different
labs and you can send
split samples to different labs and get
slightly different results right
so if i set a really artificially low
action level like 10 cfu or 50 cfu
i’m creating a do loop of work that’s
not really reducing
risk so my answer would be i
like i said i like dr miller’s work
where i consider
non-cerro group one in one control range
and zero group one and another control
range
and if i think back to the fact that
those old towers with less efficient
drift eliminators had thousands of cfu
in them
and i know there’s at least a 10x
reduction that gives me comfort because
dr miller’s recommendations might even
be
a little bit conservative once we factor
in that drift eliminator efficiency
speaking of drift eliminators we all
have cooling towers out there
that the drift eliminators have probably
failed so i can’t imagine what their
efficiency actually is
probably built way before the time
period that you’re referring to
can we retrofit those you can and
that can be a great way to reduce risk
you know you want to make sure you do it
in consultation with an equipment guy to
make sure
that you’re not creating problems with
airflow through the unit
but one of the things that i’ve
encouraged people in the nation to do
and
awt members to do is have the
the inspection of those drift
eliminators be part of your 188
program right so physically have
somebody go out and inspect them i don’t
know once a year or twice a year
because some of this equipment goes up
on the roof or out on structural steel
and nobody ever goes and looks at so in
the paper from cti they said the number
one thing
that goes wrong with drift eliminators
is they’re not either put in right or
they’re broken
right so that’s something we can do with
the customer
to help make sure that they’re
maintaining their equipment so it works
the way it should
and as you said if i had an old tower
with old drift eliminators and i was
able to update it to
more modern drift eliminators i that’s
probably the biggest thing you can do as
a water treater to
reduce risk i think i’ve seen the most
damage
done to the drift eliminators when a
contractor comes in
and they clean them and they use a
pressure washer
and they totally destroy the drift
eliminator what should they be doing
well certainly pressure washing
equipment is a delicate art form
and i can’t say that every contractor or
every vendor or every water treatment
professional always has the right
psi setting on their pressure washer but
most of the components that aren’t coils
or casings and these things are
a form of plastic so you know we can’t
pressure wash like we’re pressure
washing
uh cement board and so
cleaning them up is okay but there’s
other ways you can do it too you can you
can soak them in the basin as one
example we have
people that are concerned about salts of
evaporation building up on the
outside of the air inlet louvers and
they say oh it’s a problem with my water
treatment program well it really isn’t
because it’s not a wetted surface right
but what you find is if you have a spare
and you take that one and you lay at the
base in
all that stuff will redissolve and
you’re good to go so
pressure washing can be okay but you got
to be very careful with the psi
and also you’re going to have a hard
time really getting down
all the way into a fill pack or or drift
eliminator
with a pressure washer you can get the
top and bottom but you’re not going to
get that all the way in there
so maybe soaking them with some
surfactant or something else
might be a gentler way to make sure that
we’re not busting up the equipment
you just mentioned tower louvers because
we’re making sure
we’re communicating properly what’s the
difference between a drift eliminator
and a tower louver
okay so in a counter flow cooling tower
we’re going to have louvers on the
outside and that’s where the air is
sucked into the unit right and it’s
called it
counter flow because the air is going
from the bottom to the top
counter to the water falling from the
top to the bottom so the air
inlet louver would be it’s usually
plastic again but that’s how air is
getting into the tower
to come in contact with the water to
allow the evaporation to cool the water
so the drift eliminators are going to be
above all your wetted surfaces
and they’re typically uh between
your spray nozzle or however the water
is falling through the tower or the
cooler
and your fan if it’s an induced draft
but it’s the last thing you would see on
a force draft unit you know an
industrial refrigeration they have a lot
of four straps where the fans are on the
side and they’re blowing air up through
the top of those units if you go walk on
them you’re walking on the drift
eliminators
if you take the drift eliminators off
those units you’ll see the spray nozzles
in the top of the coil bundle
something i always recommend to
customers is what you just mentioned
when they’re buying a new cooling tower
buy an extra louver keep it in the basin
the products that we’re using it’s going
to keep it clean and you just rotate
those out
every month i tell that to everybody
that’s considering a new cooling tower
the number of people that have actually
done that i can count on one hand and
have plenty of room left over
what can i tell them to maybe make that
more successful
that’s a tough one because you know
there’s a wide variation
in both equipment maintenance and water
treatment from facility to facility
so some customers are very proactive
and very maintenance focused and others
less so
and i’m sure you see that on the on the
water treatment side as well
so that’s why i think from a water
treater standpoint it’s not really their
core competency or core responsibility
but that’s why i like to bring those
maintenance items into the 188 plan
because then it’s part of the
risk minimization or as you had said how
do we mistake proof the system a little
bit
and uh if we can get people looking at
the equipment
once or twice a year it makes a huge
difference in the maintenance of that
equipment which then makes it much
easier
for the water treatment professional to
keep the system running well
i’m reminded of a story when i first
started in water treatment so you shared
your foaming story by the way i have one
of those too i think we all have one of
those stories
but i remember i was a young water
treater and i’d sold a couple of
accounts
and i got a phone call from one of my
customers
and they told me their cooling tower was
on fire and they’ve never had this issue
before
i’ve taken it over i put my water
treatment products in there and now
they’ve got this problem
well of course it wasn’t on fire they
were seeing
the plume and i know other water
treaters have have gotten calls like
that
i think those are hilarious but what is
the plume
and can it spread legionella yeah that’s
a great
question and even some of the
regulations i
researched don’t have this right
technically so
plume um comes from the operation of the
tower
as we said a cooling tower or
evaporative cooling unit
will reject heat through the evaporation
of h2o
and during certain atmospheric
conditions the super
saturated discharge air that’s coming
out
can form a visible plume plume and drift
are completely different
so to answer your question plume cannot
create a risk for legionella because
it’s water vapor it’s not water droplets
right
so we want to distinguish between plume
which is typically
visible at parts of the year with
certain atmospheric conditions and
certain heat loads on equipment
and drift which is a small percentage of
the recirculating rate whether you can
see it or not because what we’re
concerned about is the water droplets
we’re not worried about evaporated water
which is what the plume is
and i’m convinced that god made the
plume to make it easier for us to find
future customers
that and it’s not bad when you have a
de-aerator at the plant either sometimes
exactly chris you’ve mentioned a bunch
of papers that you did some research
do you mind just going over what are
some of the papers that you
recommend that water treaters get
familiar with or at least know that
they’re out there
sure so if we think about the question
of drift eliminators and
older designs and newer designs and what
does that mean
to our water management plan the paper
that i would recommend is an iwc paper
it’s iwc-08-21
and it’s entitled cooling towers drift
and legionellosis
and it really would give a water treater
a good understanding of how cooling
towers operate
how drift is part of that how drift
eliminators
impact that and how much longer you need
to be near a modern tower to have the
chance of inhaling one bacteria
than you would an older style unit
so that’s that can be purchased i think
it’s ten dollars on the
iwc website that’s certainly a good one
the one i mentioned in my presentation
and comes back to this idea of
surfactant biodispersants
i thought it was really well done that’s
a cti paper
and cti technical paper tp 20-19
and it’s entitled impact water surface
tension on drift eliminators and it was
put together by
some gentleman from hormone thermal in
europe
and it was really interesting to me even
being in the equipment field to think
about because it wasn’t something i
thought about before i read their paper
so
if you’re interested in kind of that
question of
my drift eliminators i think that’s a
good read for people that want to go
back in time a little bit
there’s a good paper from a 1994 93-94
outbreak at a hospital in the state of
delaware
and what’s interesting in that paper is
it does a good job of showing how a
point source like a cooling tower or an
ornamental fountain
what an outbreak from a point source
looks like and
what’s unique about point source
outbreaks is the farther you get from
the point source
the uh incidence of disease goes down
and that’s different than a distributed
source where
you could have it all over the city if
it’s in the piping water
that was in the international journey of
epidemiology in 1999
and it’s called a community outbreak of
legionnaires disease
linked to hospital cooling towers um
and they’re and they’re calculating that
dose of
exposure on response so it’s pretty
interesting if you want to think of
in terms of what’s that point source
outbreak look like
the one of my favorites really is the
french
story that led to the french regulation
that was in the journal of infectious
disease in 2006
and it’s entitled a community-wide
outbreak of legionnaires disease linked
to industrial cooling towers
how far can contaminated aerosols spread
and the really interesting thing here is
in the title we’re saying it’s cooling
towers
and then when you read the the paper you
find out that
legionella likely got into the cooling
tower from a wastewater basin that was
contaminated that had aerators on it
right so it’s it’s one of those things
again
uh even if we find it in the cooling
tower and even if the cooling tower can
be contributing to the problem
is that really the source of the problem
right where’s the
how’s the legion all getting into the
coin tower and then as i mentioned i
really like the the fall 2013
technical supplement of the analysts
some of the papers in there or some of
the topics in there about
legionella testing and people that are
smarter than me talking about
is it an absolute number so in water
treatment a lot of times we’re trained
we do pinks and blues we get an answer
right
if the answer doesn’t make sense maybe
we rerun the test but most of the time
we get an answer and that’s the answer
and i think when we talk about plate
counting and that kind of stuff
it’s an interpretation of an answer so
i’m not saying it’s not the right answer
but it’s not an absolute answer right
and when you read the papers on
uh how they actually do the testing and
you read some of the papers where
they’re comparing different test
methods you find that you can have more
than one answer for a split sample and
we’ve seen that
in real life as well well then of course
there’s your paper that you presented at
last year’s
association water technologies
conference if it’s okay with you
i’d like to put on our show notes page
so everybody can
read what we’re talking about sure it’s
fine with me i
i haven’t talked to awt and i don’t know
what the schedule might be to put it in
the analyst
but certainly if we had uh the awt’s
okay it’s it’s fine with me hopefully
people will find it
interesting uh it certainly takes parts
from these other papers
and that i’ve talked about hopefully
it’ll help to focus water treatment
professionals on
this concept of a broader 188 approach
to really help drive down risk and drive
down disease
and that’s i think the message they take
out of that paper
along with some of the history and some
of the data to support
thinking in those terms chris what’s the
one
message you want to make crystal clear
on today’s interview
well the high level message i would have
is
legionella bacteria and legionnaires
disease is not a cooling tower problem
it’s a distributed water modern society
problem so going back to your thing
you know an outbreak can happen from a
cooling tower if it’s not properly
maintained
but most of the cases aren’t happening
that way so we need to go back and say
you know how do we bring down the
sporadic incidents how do we bring
down the case number how do we get new
york city under 200 instead of under 450
right and that’s the broader approach
that i think we would want people to
understand also
the other thing i would want them to
understand is a low positive test
is not a reason to set your hair on fire
you should have action levels that are
appropriate for the equipment you’re
treating
it maybe you choose to have a lower
action level for a hospital or a nursing
home than you do
another building but certainly you want
to think in terms
of reasonable action levels so that
you’re not
doing what happens sometimes in new york
preventative
high oxidizers right we’ve we’ve seen
stainless steel basins where guys are
dumping granular
oxidizers in and corroding the basin
with chloride bidding as part of just
normal business
right and um we don’t need to rely on
oxidizers and we don’t have to overreact
to low
test results well chris one of the
missions that i have with this podcast
is to educate the scaling up nation i
have no doubt that we have done that
today so
thank you so much for for helping us
understand
more uh one we don’t call everything a
cooling tower
and then how we need to be looking at
legionella bacteria
in reference to the cooling tower but
i’m not quite done with you yet i do
have some lightning round questions now
you did very well with these questions
when you came
on episode 37 so i’m sure you’re gonna
do well with these but they are
different so question number one what’s
on your bucket list
you know coming out of the year we just
had in 2020 and covid
i i have a pretty simple near-term
bucket list
i’m excited to be able to get back out
in the field
with customers and with water treatment
professionals
and to host training events and
travel a little bit you know that’s not
um like a life’s bucket list but since
we’ve been
uh you know socially distancing and
spending a lot of time at home
i’m really looking forward to getting
back to a little bit more
it’s interesting at the beginning of
2020
one of my personal goals was to have
less business travel
really it got to the point where uh i
kind of missed it
and you know unlike the nation most of
my travels on airplanes
and a lot of in the nation have a lot of
windshield time so i’m actually looking
forward to
you know being able to see you and your
team in person
i’m looking forward to the awt
convention being alive in rhode island
next fall so it’s really focused me on
kind of near-term things as we go out a
couple years
in my career hopefully we’ll continue to
grow the business in a positive way
that’s
that’s good for our customers and our
partners
and then uh hopefully brenda and i will
get to the point where we can
afford to uh retire and travel a little
bit
and uh spend a little bit more time
together what would you say your
superpower is
better not ask brenda that question
but uh you know as i think about my
career i think
really the ability to learn over time
is so critical and
to me one of the things i realized was i
was so success
oriented and so goal oriented that i
didn’t always take time for
what i call intentional kindness or or
recognizing the people you’re working
with every day
um so i don’t i’m not saying that’s a
superpower i’m working at getting better
at it
but um i think to me the real thing is
if you can
learn and grow and that’s one of the
great things about the scaling up
podcast it helps people
turn that windshield time into thinking
about things differently or thinking
about things they might not have thought
about
so hopefully my superpower will end up
being that i was
able to learn get better and
you know be a better water treater be a
better person
be a better husband be a better father
all those kind of things
well now i’m going to give you access to
my magic wand
and with this wand you can change
anything
in the world what would you change
boy i should have something deep and
meaningful for you
um i guess i guess it goes back to just
a little bit more
kindness and a little bit less of the uh
some of the tribalism and uh only
talking to people
that think the same way or believe the
same things you do
right uh we all have our faith beliefs
and our political beliefs and those kind
of things and
and just uh i i’d hope that certainly in
our country we could get to the point
where we’re
able to listen to somebody that has a
different viewpoint we may not agree
with them they may not change our mind
but
we can have a civil discussion about it
and
avoid uh name calling and those kind of
things
i think you know many people are ready
for a little bit more of that
i love that answer i think if we can
take the time
to listen to somebody even if they have
a differing opinion from what we have
we will quickly realize we always have
more in common
than we do different that’s right and
and if if water treatment hasn’t
taught you anything else it should have
taught you
that there’s always more to learn
there’s always
people doing things you may not have
thought of um and the same thing happens
in life right so we want to have
an openness to other points of view they
may not all be right for us
but if we can have that mindset and
practice some
intentional kindness in our day or slow
down and remember to do that
i think our lives will be better and i
think the people around us lives will be
better
well speaking of making lives better
you’ve made a lot of water treaters
lives better today
thank you for coming on scaling up h2o
for a
second time well i’m thrilled to be
invited back
um i’m glad i didn’t blow the
opportunity the first time in episode 37
and i
really uh appreciate all the time effort
work you put into this for the community
and congratulate you again on your well
earned award from awt this year
so nation are you thinking about the
ways you are currently
thinking about legionella about some of
the recommendations that you’ve made or
some of the recommendations that you’ve
been given
and now with all this information
we’re able to decide maybe we can do a
better job within
water management plans maybe we’re able
to do a better job because we have more
information in educating the customer so
i hope this episode really got you
thinking about that and i have to tell
you chris and
all the guys in the water department
over
at vapco they are incredible
i mentioned back in episode 37
how impressed i was with their water lab
they have cooling towers that they have
set up
that they run water treatment programs
on to see
how things work to see what
recommendations they can give
us the water treater so we can do a
better job the synergy
that avapco has had with the association
of water technologies
has just been incredible so for all you
folks out there in avapco
thank you for all the great information
that you have been
able to give to the water treatment
community
so we can make our programs better
a topic that came up when we were
talking was
knowing the volume of the system that
you are treating
now as i mentioned i’m the math guy i
get the privilege of
teaching math at the association of
water technologies when we do the
technical
training each and every year i
get on the stage there and i get on a
soapbox and i say
how can we tell ourselves that we are
water treaters if we don’t know the
amount of water that we
are treating and chris really drove that
home today
in his story so i want you to think
of all the systems that you’re treating
do you know you’re really treating
for the volume of water and if you have
any questions on the volume of water
in your system and how to figure that
out i talked about that back in episode
116 so you can review that episode
that will get you started on trying to
figure out how much
water is in your system and folks that
was a james’s challenge
a few weeks back so hopefully you’re
already
thinking about that but i have to tell
you if you don’t know the amount of
water that’s in your system
are you really a water treater i want
you to ask yourselves that
nation as you heard i asked chris a
different set
of questions in the lightning round
because he
already answered the questions that i
normally ask
and one of those questions was a bucket
list
for those of you that aren’t familiar
with a bucket list that’s the things
that you want to do
before quite frankly you kick the bucket
i know that’s kind of morbid to think
about
but you know it’s going to happen with
everybody we all have certain things
that we want to get
accomplished so instead of just
waiting until there’s no time left use
your imagination
what are the things that really excite
you what are the things
that you want to do in
your lifetime and then make a list of it
share that list with your closest
friends
and see how you guys can work together
to make sure that you can accomplish
those items that’s something i ask
everybody that comes to work
here at blackmore enterprises i ask them
if they have a bucket list
and if they say no i encourage them to
make one and then as soon as they make
one or if they tell me they already have
one
i asked if they don’t mind letting me
see it and then
we pick one item on that list
that we are going to work on together
and hopefully we could get crossed off
within the first year of them
being here it’s a lot of fun for me
i feel like i’m helping them achieve
some of their highest goals
they’re enjoying things because they
know that they’re accomplishing what
they want to get accomplished so if you
don’t have a bucket list
i urge you to start working on one
today the next thing i want to urge you
to do is tune in next week
to a brand new episode of scaling up h2o
[Music]
nation almost two years ago i started
the rising
tide mastermind we have over four groups
and a waiting list for a
new group folks it is wildly successful
and what i mean by that
is that we are able to process issues
together and
get new ideas about how
we solve the issues that we all face day
to day
in ways that we might not have come up
with on
our own folks look into the rising tide
mastermind to see if it
is right for you by going to scaling up
h2o.com forward slash
mastermind if what you see looks
interesting
schedule and appointment with me and we
will see
if the group is right for you and you
are right for the group