316(b) Consulting Services

Burns & McDonnell was selected to provide professional 316(b) consulting services for 11 facilities subject to Phase II of Section 316(b) of the Clean Water Act. The facilities are in Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota on waterbodies such as Lake Michigan, Rock River, Cedar River, Cedar Lake Fox Lake and the Mississippi River. Each of the facilities requires a variety of services ranging from modifications to the intake structure to impingement and/or entrainment monitoring.

• 316(b) compliance
• Impingement monitoring
• Entrainment monitoring
• Regulatory consultation

The scope of work for each facility involved selecting the most advantageous compliance alternative — based on life-cycle cost analyses, preparation of a Proposal for Information Collection (PIC), and, if necessary, designing and conducting impingement and/or entrainment mortality studies. The life-cycle cost analyses involved evaluating compliance options such as cooling towers, barrier nets, and fish handling and return systems. The PIC included a description(s) of the chosen compliance option or compliance options to be evaluated, a summary of consultations with fish and wildlife agencies, a summary of historical fisheries studies done on the water body in question, and a sampling plan for field studies needed to develop an estimate of impingement and/or entrainment mortality.

One of these facilities has a large cooling water lake that is supplied with water by pump from an adjacent river. This lake was determined to be part of a closed-cycle system and the lake water intake was shown to have a design intake rate of less than 50 million gallons per day. As such, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (WDNR) agreed this facility is not subject to the Section 316(b) regulations.

For another facility built in the 1920s, Burns & McDonnell demonstrated that the annual operating time, and therefore the annual intake rate, was approximately 5 percent of full time operations. The WDNR concurred that the 5 percent operation rate represented a 95 percent reduction in impingement and entrainment rate relative to the design rate. As such, the facility was deemed to be in compliance with the Section 316(b) regulations provided the current rate of operations does not substantially increase in the future.

For the facilities on Cedar Lake and Fox Lake, Burns & McDonnell recommended the installation of ⅜-inch mesh, floating, barrier nets with through-flow velocities of less than 0.5 feet per second. These nets will meet 316(b) requirements for impingement mortality reduction and avoid preparation of a Section 316(b) Comprehensive Demonstration Study.

Burns & McDonnell is conducting impingement studies at the remaining facilities. Of these, entrainment monitoring is also being conducted at three facilities.

Facilities:

• Edgewater
• Black Hawk
• Rock River
• Nelson Dewey
• Lansing
• Dubuque
• M.L. Kapp
• Burlington
• 6th Street
• Prairie Creek
• Fox Lake