Project: Baton Rouge Wastewater Pump Station SCADA System (February 16, 2006)

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February 16, 2006

Only the very patient should pursue municipal work.

When will our project get back on schedule? When can we venture to accurately re-schedule? If you look back, you will see that on September 6th, 2005 we first reported that the City of Baton Rouge had decided it needed to rebid the contract that supplied the PLC and HMI hardware to be used at the remote pump stations in this SCADA project. Despite the lack of feedback from the primary consultant, we are moving forward with amending the project schedule under the assumption that a new PLC and HMI hardware vendor can be selected and contracted with by the end of April.

A complete budgetary review is also being performed. It is suspected that the continuing delays together with price increases over the past year are having a negative impact on the job profitability, due to no fault of our own. More about this after we finish the review.

Last week's RTU analog output problem turned out to be self-inflicted. The problem originated when our field personnel switched the original 12V dc supply with a new battery-backed 12V dc power supply and charger system. The existing RTU vendor's 12V dc power source had a requirement to have the negative supply side grounded. Based upon my conversation with one of the RTU manufacturer's engineers, this point is not well known by the manufacturer, either. It took one of our personnel who had been involved with the original RTU installation 10 years ago to isolate the problem. Such is the value of experience.