Evolution of Urban Water Systems Analysis1

First, thanks to Wayne Huber for his generous introduction. Much of what I have been able to accomplish since 1968 has been due to our collaboration on a variety of water resources methods and applications to significant urban water problems including national assessments of combined and sanitary sewer overflows in the United States and Canada, restoration of the Kissimmee River and the Everglades, and national studies of the potential of low impact development for urban storm water systems. Second, I am honored to join the distinguished group of Julian Hinds Award winners who have made major advances in the water resources field. Ironically, my interest in rational optimization methods to inform decision making runs counter to my personal experience of a series of serendipitous events that have resulted in major opportunities. My interest in civil engineering was nurtured by personal experience growing up on the west side of Chicago adjacent to the Eisenhower Expressway that was under construction during most of my childhood years. I witnessed several major changes in my neighborhood including moving houses out of the right of way, and sophisticated construction techniques to fit an expressway and mass transit railroad into a narrow right of way. The “Ike” was finished when I was a senior in high school, and transformed my neighborhood into a traffic congested area with high levels of noise and air pollution. I learned of a co-op scholarship opportunity with the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago (MSDGC) to study civil engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology through my little league baseball coach a few weeks before the beginning of classes. Without this scholarship, I would have been unable to attend college. MSDGC is a national and international leader in wastewater and storm water management and their co-op program provided invaluable experience in several aspects of sanitary and civil engineering. My co-op experience in sanitary engineering helped me get selected to satisfy my military obligation as a U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) officer studying salinity problems on the Colorado River Basin. This work introduced me to the major water issues of the western United States and their link to economic development with irrigated agriculture being the predominant water user. However, our progress was slow because we had to rely on slide rules and simple calculators. My wife and I missed our families and decided to return to Chicago with our two young children after fulfilling my two-year service obligation in the summer of 1964. Fortunately, the PHS offered graduate traineeships in water pollution control, and I was selected to attend Northwestern University for a one-year master’s degree program. My introduction to water resource systems came from Professor Bob Gemmell, a recent Harvard graduate who had participated in the seminal Harvard water program. Shortly before finishing my master’s degree, Professor Gemmell asked me if I was interested in staying at Northwestern to pursue a Ph.D. As a father with two small children, I had not considered this option. My wife generously agreed to my continuing graduate school. By then, I was familiar with the doctoral work of Walter Lynn on optimizing wastewater treatment plants, and Rolf Deininger on regional water quality management. Both of them studied with Professor Abe Charnes, an applied mathematician and a pioneer in optimization methods whose major theoretical advances came from solving real problems. I took both of Professor Charnes’ courses and he agreed to be a member of my Ph.D. committee. This was the beginning of a close relationship that lasted many years. Professor Charnes had a gift of convincing his students that they knew more than they thought. This kept us working hard to live up to our undeserved reputations. The major intellectual breakthrough in my research was seeing the relationship between the dual variables of linear programs and economic theory. For my research, this link provided the marginal value of water in the Colorado River Basin, which turned out to be quite small due to the prevalence of low valued irrigation. In order to supplement my income during graduate school, I worked part time for the American Public Works Association (APWA) on a study of the nature of storm water runoff pollution in Chicago. This study included modeling and field sampling of the nature of urban runoff. I joined the faculty of the Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences at the University of Florida in the fall of 1968. Wayne Huber had arrived two months earlier. EPA’s predecessor was interested in developing a computer simulation model to evaluate overflows from combined and separate sewers. Drawing on my experience with APWA, Wayne and I wrote a proposal to develop such a model. Our proposal was combined with two other proposals to develop the Storm Water Management Model (SWMM) that was released in 1971. Our development group and the sponsor favored an open source model to allow freer exchange of ideas and the ability of users to inspect the code. This open source approach has been a vital element in sustaining EPA SWMM for the past 42 years and continuing to nurture its refinement. I would like to think that our national assessments for U.S. EPA done in the mid-1970s using a combination of optimization and simulation with SWMM had a positive impact in convincing the federal government of the importance of initiating urban storm water pollution control programs rather than committing their resources exclusively to building advanced waste treatment plants for dryweather flows. Thanks to insights provided by Professor Charnes, I took an early interest in cooperative n person game theory to address equity issues associated with water resources problems. The optimal solutions to problems often have very undesirable equity characteristics, e.g., group 1 receives the bulk of the benefits whereas group 2 pays the bulk of the costs. A major benefit from using game theory is that it forced us to explicitly consider the winners and losers associated with various scenarios. It also made it evident that some games will be inherently competitive depending upon key initial assumptions regarding ownership of common resources. Overall, the 1960s and 1970s can be viewed as the golden days of water resources systems analysis. Mainframe computers opened up a new world of powerful analytical tools that forever changed how we address problems. Federal support for major interdisciplinary initiatives reached all-time highs with a variety of major research initiatives, e.g., NSF’s Research Applied to This lecture was given by James Heaney after receiving the 2012 Julian Hinds Award.