Camden-Clark Hospital Cutting Water Usage
PARKERSBURG – Camden-Clark Memorial Hospital will use around 10 million gallons of water less a year through conservation and contracting services, hospital officials said.
Steve Cockerham, director of engineering at the hospital explained that during the last year, most of the conservation of water is done in the laundry department. All the laundry labor was transferred to laundry services to a private contractor. This simple transfer of work would save about 9 million gallons a year.
Other steps include retrofitting equipment, such as water flow controllers to reduce the overflow of water in the sterilizers. Limiting how often the boilers are blown off to remove impurities also saves considerable amount of water.
The sterilizers, which generally run around the clock, had required a constant flow of water. To avoid overflows, timers were installed to control the flow. This would save 1.4 million gallons a year. That’s little more than $8,000. The installation has already paid for itself. The cost of the equipment and the installation charged $3,600.
Cockerham accepted that the good thing besides the savings is we are not using the water. To remove impurities from the boilers, releasing steam blows off the material. This process is called “blow down”. The boilers are needed to be on constant blow down for them to function properly. Using chemicals to the water to consolidate the impurities cuts blow down process to once in a day. It saves about 150,000 gallons a day.
Camden-Clark averages 40 million gallons of water a year at a cost of about $232,000, spokesman Greg Smith said. Conservation and outsourcing will save about 25 percent in both usage and cost. This would help us to look at ecological and cost savings that would keep the cost of health care lower.
Jill Parsons, director of marketing and community relations at St. Joseph hospital says that they buy equipment with cost savings features, such as sterilizers with flow control valves, which use the least natural resources for the most benefit.
Camden-Clark from April 2002 to March 2003 used 41.6 million gallons of water, according to documents filed with the Parkersburg Utility Board. The hospital used 36.7 million from April 2003 to March 2004 after the water conservation project is taken up. While on the other hand, St. Joseph’s usage was 47.3 million gallons from April 2002 to March 2003 and 48.8 million from April 2003 to March 2004. The comparisons were for the main hospital facilities and physicians office complexes.
According to Clarence Cox, utility board manager, Conservation is good, but there’s another aspect to consider. Like so many things in life, it’s a two-edge sword. The institution is spending and using less water, increasing available capacity of the treatment system in the community, but the utility board loses revenue by the same scale. This would be more beneficial to the utility board if these steps were adopted when there was a water shortage.
Cockerham’s job as engineering director has come up with methods to save such operational costs. He has been more successful in implementing revolutionary ideas, which are beneficiary to the hospital in terms of economy, but also promote the society in some way or the other. He says, “Some are common sense”.