Meet the Team Behind Grapevine’s Invisible Essentials
31 Oct 2024
Blog, News
Do you ever think about where your water comes from… or where it goes when you drain the sink? What about how your phone is charged overnight or connected to public Wi-Fi? Whether you live, work, or play in Grapevine, you’re sharing a network of complex systems with tens of thousands of people every moment you’re here. And you probably didn’t notice.
A dedicated team of engineers and technicians wants to keep it that way.
The Public Works team in Grapevine is among the City’s largest, with a staff responsible for everything from traffic lights to water treatment. Those modern amenities are designed to function seamlessly, creating the illusion of effortless convenience that makes resources like water, electricity, and the internet invisible by design. As a result, we tend not to notice the people maintaining the systems we rely on until they’re handling a crisis. Fortunately for our City, the Public Works team has risen to the occasion time and again.
A 21st Century Approach to a Centuries-Old Profession
On the timeline of human history, civil engineering and resource management aren't exactly new. If anything, they’re the foundation of civilization itself. Communities tend to develop around access to basic building blocks, and the successful organization thereof is the key to lasting growth. Done right, those services are ubiquitous. Done wrong, they generate collapse.
“You don’t think about where your water comes from when you drink it. You don’t think about where your water goes when you flush the toilet or take a shower,” said Elizabeth Reynolds, a veteran member of the Public Works Department who now serves as the City’s Traffic Engineer.
“There are people behind the scenes that are engineers and people behind the scenes that are operations – that do all the physical work and run the plants – but as far as engineering goes, it’s really the planning, maintaining, and thinking out of the future. Pretty much the Level Zero that society needs to build up from. Without clean drinking water, places for your water to go, and roads? I don’t know what we would be doing.”
Grapevine’s residents understood the need for those services almost as soon as they arrived. By the 1920s – when less than half of Americans had electricity in their homes – Main Street was electrified with a privately run phone company. Local officials and the Army Corps of Engineers were already planning to create City’s eponymous lake, which now provides flood control for the region and more than a third of Grapevine’s potable water. Their forward-thinking is remarkable, but not without challenging knock-on effects. Just ask GIS Engineer Adailin Mallin, whose team is responsible for cataloging and mapping resources across the community.
“In terms of spatial accuracy, we try to get the best data we can,” Mailin said. “Some of these plans that are older than the 1970s or 1980s are just blurred images. Trying to digitize – which is, basically, drawing on a map – where it is, in terms of referencing a corner or street intersection, gets very difficult. So Main Street gets very hard for us because, as we have a citizen-driven approach, we don’t want to disrupt any businesses. If there is a break on a water line or a sewer line, we try to repair it as fast as possible. To almost make it seem like nothing ever broke. Do we have time to go and GPS allocation when that line is exposed? No. We’re not readily available for that. But we try to get as accurate as we can with the resources we have.”
Over the summer, Mallin and a team of interns leveraged a highly accurate set of GPS tools to mark and map water mains throughout the City. Over time, and with grant funding she aims to secure, they’ll be using technology that can measure geographic position within a centimeter of accuracy to locate and catalog every essential piece of infrastructure under their purview. And they aren’t the only ones using new-age tools to upgrade City systems.
How a 70-Year-Old System Beat Winter Storm Uri
As noted previously, Grapevine residents rely on a local water treatment plant for an employee-estimated 35% of their drinking water. The rest is supplied by the Trinity River Authority, a water conservation district serving 18,000 square miles in the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. So when Winter Storm Uri blanketed the entire state and the TRA had to issue Boil Water Notices to their partner cities, Grapevine faced a tough test: preventing burst pipes and damaged utilities during the freeze while keeping citizens safe and healthy.
“Disrupting water and wastewater is dangerous. If you can’t remove the waste from people’s houses, it becomes a health issue. If you can’t provide people with safe water, it’s a health issue. Especially during a time when houses are without power and movement is limited,” said Jimmy Didehbani, the now-retired supervisor of Grapevine’s Water Treatment who oversaw the City's response in 2021.
“I was fortunate to have a good staff, and we managed not even to go to a Boil Water Notice. We made it to where we didn’t have any health issues on the water side and none on the wastewater side. We treated our wastewater during the whole storm and provided safe water to our citizens during the whole period. And we could see, at any given time, how much water was going out to the houses… we used that system to isolate our leaks during the storm. Within about ten hours, we stopped all the leaks and went back to normal.”
As luck (or good planning) would have it, Didehbhani’s team completed an upgrade and automatization of their facility just weeks before the storm. While the water and wastewater systems in Grapevine have seen multiple upgrades and renovations over the last few decades, this one was special. It created a dashboard that helped them monitor leaks and usage in real-time, even though Didehbhani was caught waiting for a flight home from Boston.
He supervised everything from his phone. By the time his rescheduled flight touched down at DFW International Airport, the team had shifted from crisis response to recovery. In the days that followed, they lent supplies to other communities that weren’t so lucky. In the years since, they’ve given tours to everyone from the Environmental Protection Agency to representatives from Dallas and Fort Worth.
The customized system they designed and installed represents the cutting edge of their field; a pattern that plays out often in Grapevine.
Proactive Planning Boosts Productivity on Dallas Road
One doesn’t have to think very hard to remember the crisis that preceded (and coincided with) that storm. The coronavirus pandemic declared in 2020 brought all sorts of adverse effects, from the temporary closure of schools to the cultural realignment required for remote and hybrid work. One positive side effect? A dramatic decrease in vehicle traffic that opened the door for a surge in road construction.
“COVID gave us a lot of challenges, and a lot of opportunities,” said City Manager Bruno Rumbelow. “Trouble is like that: typically, on the other side of trouble, there is opportunity. You just have to realize it and see it for what it is… we were in the middle of the Grapevine Main project, sort of toward the end of it, and also in the middle of the Dallas Road Pedestrian, Surface, and Lighting improvements. So there was a unique opportunity for us to do part of that project in a 30-day period that would have taken six months had we done it outside of the COVID timeframe because we had to keep traffic flowing. When COVID came, we shut the entire intersection down and did the entire Texas star in the middle of Dallas and Main.”
They didn’t stop there.
“Once you start that process, thinking that way, there became other opportunities,” Rumbelow said. “We essentially redid Main Street. Redid sidewalks and pedestrian islands. Put crosswalks in. A lot of improvements happened not just because of the Dallas Road project, but because we began to look at Main Street and think to ourselves: ‘OK, since we’re here and since businesses are closed, activity is down, what can we do?’ I have to give a lot of credit to our Public Works teams who said we should be doing this, and we should be doing this now.”
Some of those improvements had been planned and scheduled to unfold over months or even years. Others came as the result of a dedicated staff looking to make the most of an opportunity. Because the Public Works team had proactively identified areas that needed improvement, it was easy to make a list and prioritize projects that could improve the Historic District for everyone.
Doing so during the strategic window opened by COVID-19 saved the City time and money, and opened the door for more improvements and long-term thinking. In fact, Dallas Road and the associated pedestrian corridor rank among the top areas for development interest today.