City of Prince Rupert's latest Bid request to seek out providers for SCADA communication system

Getting the various elements of the city's water infrastructure to talk with each other is the subject of the next Request for Proposals from the City of Prince Rupert.

A call for Bids, posted to the BC Bid website on Wednesday seeks out the services towards performing the work required for complete replacement of programmable logic controllers in City water and wastewater facilities and related work.

The SCADA sites are located at various locations throughout the City of Prince Rupert including two sites on the north side of Fern Passage.

The sites to see SCADA system upgrades in place include:

Shawatlan, Frederick, Montreal Circle, Crestview, Silversides,
Comox, Pillsbury, SourDough Bay, Hays Creek

A sample of one of the existing SCADA system boxes
(from BC Bid listing)

The City's Operations Director Richard Pucci, provided a short synopsis of how the SCADA system works at the January 9th Council session.  

His response was related a question following a presentation on the status of towers for the system, but his explanation provided a tutorial on what the SCADA systems is all about.

"SCADA communication is the system in which all of the pumps and relays and everything all talk to each other just in really basic terms. It's a software system and with computers and the way we're doing it is with the radio towers you can have point to point contact. So that we can have better communication with all our systems. 

So for instance when we see draw coming down on a reservoir, it clicks a PLC that then turns on a pump way over at Shawtlans, which as you know is 10 kilometres away.

So these types of things all talk to each other ... Because of the way our community is set up as a whole, we aren't very flat as everyone knows, so we have a lot of pump stations, we have a lot of enforce means and things like to move our water around the community or our sewer around the community. 

The SCADA communication handles both eater and sewer to turn pumps on and turn them off and move and adjust as need be" -- Operations Director Richard  Pucci On SCADA at the January 9th Council session

The RFP process is open until the closing date of February 28th.

You can review the BC Bid package from the provincial website here.

More notes on past Bids can be explored through our archive page.

Other items of interest from the Major Projects files can be explored here.