It’s not easy managing water and wastewater services for a city where demand doesn’t just fluctuate—it surges with each weekend and summer season.
Morro Bay, a scenic coastal community of 10,000 residents, faces exactly this challenge. With its prime oceanside location, the city is a popular tourist destination. So just like the ocean tides, the population ebbs and flows, drawing in waves of visitors that put additional pressure on water supply and wastewater treatment systems.
Morro Bay’s utilities division must adapt to seasonal spikes, safeguard against saltwater intrusion, and ensure access to clean, reliable water for both residents and visitors.
To manage these complexities effectively, the city's control systems must be robust, adaptable, and capable of handling the dynamic demands of a fluctuating population.
The scenic coastal community of Morro Bay, California
Inherited Challenges
In 2019, when Operational Technology Specialist Grant Chase went to work in Morro Bay, he found a utilities infrastructure in need of unification and stability. The city’s water and wastewater control systems were a patchwork of different technologies—some dating back decades:
- Various water treatment processes at the reverse osmosis filtration facility, running on Allen-Bradley® SLC 5/05 PLCs from the 1980s
- An aging wastewater treatment plant built in the 1960s with minimal automation and absolutely no modern SCADA oversight
- Water distribution systems (tanks and pumping stations) running on Opto 22’s SNAP PAC Systems™ from the 1990s
- Wastewater lift stations running on Opto 22’s SNAP PAC Systems with a mix of Opto 22’s Windows®-based PAC Display™ and web-based groov View® for visualization
- Underground wells with more SNAP PAC Systems that had been disconnected, requiring manual well control
“Each part of the system operated independently with minimal cohesion and no standardized way to visualize data across processes,” Chase says.
The system’s fragmented nature meant operators had to juggle multiple platforms, often struggling to get a complete real-time view of operations.
Furthermore, the city’s existing remote access solution relied on port forwarding, a risky approach that creates vulnerabilities by exposing internal networks directly to the internet. This method bypasses key security controls, making critical infrastructure an easier target for cyberattacks.
Chase recalls his initial gut reaction: “No way! We can’t do that.”
Being right on the ocean means Morro Bay needs to safeguard against saltwater intrusion.
Steps Toward the Future
“When new management arrived in 2021, they were receptive to my input. I took the opportunity to get a groov EPIC® [Opto 22’s Edge Programmable Industrial Controller] and migrate some of our existing groov View projects from the original groov Boxes™ to the new hardware platform,” Chase says. The groov View web-based HMI software comes free on all groov EPICs.
The added controller horsepower was great—namely a GRV-EPIC-PR1 controller with a quad-core processor—but additional features on groov EPIC would help take Morro Bay’s water management to the next level.
“Licensing Ignition Edge® on the groov EPIC enabled a direct and reliable OPC UA® connection to the existing SLC 5/05 PLCs in our reverse osmosis facility. [It] turns out SLC 5/05s were the first Allen-Bradley PLC with a native Ethernet port,” says Chase.
From there, he made the OPC UA connection back to groov View, unifying disparate controls from different brands onto a single display technicians could view on department computers and mobile devices.
Another New Facility Comes Online
In 2022, another major project was in the works: a brand-new wastewater treatment plant. Construction of the new facility was based on specifications that had been laid out before Chase joined the team. Most of the facility’s control would be handled with Allen-Bradley PLCs, and unfortunately remote access was not part of the original specification.
“Weeks before startup, our operators began asking about mobile access to the new treatment facility—something they had gotten used to on the Opto 22 systems that were running groov View,” notes Chase.
Since Chase had already proven out the groov EPIC’s ability to leverage Ignition Edge to connect to disparate PLCs, the solution was a no-brainer.
The City of Morro Bay's brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) facility.
Secure Solutions for Remote Access and Monitoring
While
groov View provided the operators with the level of oversight and control they were looking for, Chase had to turn his attention to ensuring his operators had secure remote access to their screens.
To meet today’s stringent cybersecurity standards, Chase shut down insecure network access to inbound ports (used for port forwarding), and began using ZeroTier® VPN, a virtual networking software with a number of features key to their IIoT deployment:
- Virtual network for secure, local-network-like connection to IIoT devices
- Direct, low-latency access for fast, seamless communication across the internet
- Cryptographic security for ensuring that devices, including operators’ mobile phones, use unique cryptographic IDs
- Easy integration to existing systems without making major hardware changes
Now, with a simple VPN configuration on their mobile phones, Morro Bay’s water operators have secure access to their systems from anywhere in the world.
Revitalizing Reliable Tech
In the following months, Chase connected more systems. He turned his attention to the city’s four brackish water wells. The wells were operational, but they were being run manually, with no communication or connection to central operations. Manual operation required technicians to spend time traveling to the wells and risked damage to unmonitored equipment.
Upon investigation, Chase discovered abandoned SNAP PAC controllers in place at the wells. The controllers
were still functional but not in use. He began restoring the existing controllers and bridged the network gap to the remote sites using Ubiquiti® 5 GHz radios.
A savvy customer, Chase knew about
Opto 22’s lifetime guarantee, so at the BWRO (brackish water reverse osmosis) facility, he repurposed existing SNAP modules to expand the system without additional hardware costs. Not a bad idea, considering Opto 22—now in its 50th year—recently reaffirmed long-term support for SNAP PAC products, ensuring continued reliability and performance for decades to come.
“This is a really big deal for the bottom line. Too often government organizations trash and replace working equipment in the name of modernization. The R1s [
SNAP-PAC-R1] work perfectly, and being a public municipality, saving money for the city really means something,” Chase adds.
Where he needed additional I/O points to run two new chemical dosing pumps, Chase added some
groov RIO®s, Opto 22’s compact, IIoT-ready remote I/O devices. With the wells now fully automated, operational, and networked back to his central servers, it was simple to add well-site screens onto his
groov View project for secure operator access.