“Not just pump failure.” How one Texas operator stopped guessing

Yancey Water Supply Corporation runs water and wastewater systems across a stretch of rural Texas west of San Antonio.

A member-owned utility founded in 1978, it also operates systems for other communities and private sites in the region. One of those is the Flying L Ranch Resort near Bandera, the Cowboy Capital of the World.

The resort is a small utility in its own right: two sewage lift stations, wells feeding a water plant, storage tanks, and a wastewater treatment plant, all sitting on the Trinity Aquifer, which comes with its own rules. Looking after it is Ernest Moreno, Yancey Water’s Senior Operator, who has spent years keeping small systems like this one running with very few hands.

For most of that time, the alarm system at the Flying L was a set of legacy autodialers on copper phone lines. When something went wrong, a unit would dial Ernest and tell him a station was down. That was all. “The dial-up would just tell me if a pump station was down,” he says. Which pump, why, how urgent: he’d find out when he got there.

Getting there was the problem. From a failed pump to a spilling tank is about 45 minutes. The drive is about 30. That leaves a quarter of an hour to diagnose a fault you know nothing about, in a wet well 20 to 40 feet deep. And the phone lines carrying those bare-bones alarms were costing the resort more every year to maintain.

Ernest already knew there was a better way, because he’d seen one.

At Moore, Texas, another small system he runs, he’d been standing at a lift station looking at the old dial-out unit when a stranger pulled up and started talking. It was Ralph Royall, RACO’s Senior Sales Application Engineer, driving through town. “He caught me at the right moment,” Ernest says. RACO installed an AlarmAgent unit at Moore that August, in 108-degree heat, with Ralph hanging it alongside the crew. “Ralph’s a great guy.”

So when the time came for Flying L to consider switching to RACO, Ralph designed a full setup for the five sites. Ernest wrote the proposal, and the Ranch’s management approved it.

RACO AlarmAgent units now watch every site, reporting over the cellular network into the RACO Monitoring Center (RMC).

The units still call out the moment something trips, but they also send the detail: which input, at which site, and the operating data behind it.

“I can see exactly what’s what,” Ernest says. “RACO gives me more information, exactly what I need. It lets me spot problems and gives me a timeframe on how to react.”

The difference shows most at the treatment plant. Before, the only alarms were inside the lift stations. If the effluent tank overfilled, the whole plant could overfill and back up into the main works, and nobody would know until it had. Ernest put RACO on the effluent tank and the blowers as well as the lift stations. “What’s overflowing? RACO tells me that.”

The bigger change is what happens in the truck. “Knowing what the problem is and not having to guess. That alarm tells me what it is. I already know what I’m going to go down to. Not just ‘pump failure.’ We’re prepared for it.”

Yancey is now putting RACO on its newest project, a water reuse plant at the Megan’s Landing subdivision near Castroville, where treated wastewater is recycled for irrigation. And Ernest has become an unpaid advocate. At industry seminars, when he runs into Ralph, he tells other operators what he told the Flying L’s management team: “It’s like SCADA but you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for it.”