A Water Leader Joins a New Wildfire Commission
By Kris Polly
Andy Fecko, the general manager of Placer County Water Agency, was recently named to the Wildland Fire Mitigation and Management Commission, a new body that will provide recommendations to Congress on fire management. Mr. Fecko’s name will be familiar to our readers, and the water community is lucky to have him on the new commission. He tells us more about its mission in our cover interview.
We also speak with Brett Graham, the water systems analyst at Riverside County–based Rancho California Water District. Mr. Graham recently came up with an idea to capture the power of Rancho’s piped-in surface water with a hydropower unit, then using it to power the district’s wells.
Mike Klimers is the utility superintendent for the City of Savage, Minnesota. Savage recently installed a KETOS system to automatically monitor the water the city receives through an interconnection to a neighboring municipality’s system so that the city can be alerted if anything goes wrong.
Northwest Pipe’s InfraShield Seismic Resilient Joint System is a proprietary, patent-pending product that helps buried pipe withstand seismic events and other permanent ground movements without leaking water. This ingenious system allows the pipe to stretch or fold rather than break. Northwest Pipe Company’s senior director of engineering, Rich Mielke, tells us more about the new system and its potential applications.
Next, we talk with Mark Turpin, the president of Duperon, a Saginaw, Michigan–based company that offers screening solutions and expertise for wastewater plants, flood control, and stormwater. We speak with Mr. Turpin about Duperon’s numerous screen and rake products and their applications.
Finally, Duncan White, the director of sales and marketing at ViewTech Borescopes, tells us about his company’s devices, which can inspect and photograph small interior spaces within wastewater treatment and other municipal water-related structures.
Municipal water professionals address tough challenges every day to fulfill their crucial mission of providing clean drinking water as well as wastewater and stormwater management services to the people of our nation. As the stories in this month’s magazine demonstrate, their expertise is impressive, and that makes it all the more heartening that a water management professional like Mr. Fecko will be part of the new wildfire commission. M
Kris Polly is the editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and the president and CEO of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with Congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He can be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.