Mission Possible: Developing a Complex Hydraulic Model for Miami-Dade County Utilizing Widespread Data Sources

The development and calibration of a hydraulic model for complex wastewater system can be a daunting task. When the system serves a current population of over 2,000,000 residents, contains over 1,000 pumping stations in a 900 mile manifold system of forcemains, and has complex gravity flow to pressurize flow transitions with almost 100,000 total pipes, that task might be considered impossible. With proper planning and experience and leveraging available data sources with today's technology, the task can be made “Mission Possible”. This paper will concentrate on the rationalization of data discrepancies used in the development of the wastewater system hydraulic model in Miami Dade, and how the challenges of implementing such a complex model within a short time-frame were overcome. Based on the sharing of “lessons learned” readers will be able to better assess their data and information sources and plan for the development or improvement of their own hydraulic models for the proactive assessment of their systems.