www.ca-nv-awwa.org 19
WRD WAS ESTABLISHED IN
1959 as the state agency respon-sible
for managing ground-water
replenishment and maintaining
water quality in the Central Basin and
West Coast basin, two of the most heavily
utilized urban groundwater basins in Cal-ifornia,
serving nearly four million resi-dents.
WRD’s 420-square mile service area
includes 43 cities in southern Los Angeles
County, which use about 250,000 acre-feet
of groundwater annually.
As part of WRD’s integrated compre-hensive
program for locally sustainable
water reuse, the Groundwater Reliability
Improvement Program Advanced Water
Treatment Facility (GRIP AWTF) is sched-uled
to come online in 2018. The facility
will purify approximately 10,000 acre-feet
a year (3.25 billion gallons) of tertiary
treated recycled water to near distilled
levels for aquifer recharge. The devel-opment
of the GRIP AWTF presented a
unique opportunity for WRD to rethink
how it will manage 1) facility operations,
monitoring, and maintenance, 2) its new-ly
established enterprise systems, and 3)
additional critical infrastructure. The ef-fort
included a comprehensive redesign
of its Supervisory Control and Data Ac-quisition
(SCADA) system to provide op-erational
efficiencies across the spectrum
of WRD’s core services and management
systems. To implement these improve-ments,
WRD will invest approximately
$250 million over the next several years.
Cybersecurity was identified as a critical
element early in the design process.
The Need for a Master System
In addition to the GRIP ATWF, WRD
operates two treatment plants, including
the Leo J. Vander Lans Advanced
Water Treatment Facility (Vander Lans
AWTF, in operation since 2005), which
produces up to eight million gallons a
day (MGD) of advanced treated recycled
water for aquifer injection to prevent
seawater intrusion, and the Robert W.
Goldsworthy Desalter (Goldsworthy
Desalter), which utilizes reverse osmosis
membranes to purify 2.5 MGD of
brackish groundwater for potable use
and will undergo a 2.5 MGD expansion
scheduled for completion in 2017.
Both plants are currently monitored
by individually operated supervisory
control and data acquisition systems.
Monitoring includes changes in control
parameters, alarming of operations,
trending of process parameters, and
analytical auditing and/or reporting.
Since these facilities were construct-ed
at different times, they were not de-signed
and integrated based on a cen-tralized
master SCADA system with a
standardized architecture. WRD’s goal
is to integrate these systems into a Cen-tralized
Information System (CIS), a sin-gle
network with a centralized monitor-ing
and command center.
First Steps Toward Cyber
Security
To fully understand the nature and ex-tent
of potential cybersecurity challenges
related to its proposed system improve-ments,
WRD developed a SCADA System
Master Plan. This involved a baseline as-sessment
of the SCADA infrastructure at
existing facilities, followed by an opportu-nities
and constraints analysis that includ-ed
hardware, software, communication
architecture and protocols, reporting, cost
estimating and phased project implemen-tation
schedules.
The SCADA System Master Plan was
utilized as a planning tool to:
• Document potential integration issues
and informational and user needs for
the SCADA systems at WRD’s exist-ing
and planned facilities.
• Identify strengths and weaknesses of
current facility operations.
• Evaluate current technologies for the
SCADA system architecture.
• Provide recommendations to sup-port
development of the master
SCADA system and the cybersecu-rity
program.
The Project Portfolio
A Project Portfolio of 20 system projects
was developed to support WRD’s goal
of a centralized and standardized master
THE GOAL is to integrate
these systems into a single
network with a centralized
monitoring and command
center, the Centralized
Information System (CIS).
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