GIS software can track everything from size and age of the water-distribution pipes to the work orders crews tackled three months ago.
As a consultant with the New Jersey office of CDM, a national consulting, engineering, and construction firm, Bill Cesanek is spending an increasing amount of his time helping municipalities install geographic information systems—systems that are better known by the acronym GIS.
And Cesanek doesn’t expect this to change anytime soon.
After all, by using GIS software, municipal officials can track everything from the size and age of the water-distribution pipes running throughout their system to the work orders their crews tackled three months ago.
GIS are such powerful management tools, Cesanek says, it’s little wonder that municipalities are turning to them to help run their wastewater and drinking-water treatment systems more efficiently.” The beauty of GIS is that they have mapping combined with database information,” Cesanek says. “You can have the software track the date pipes were installed, the frequency of repairs made at different points in the system. You can connect that to a line on a map that represents the pipe on a specific block.
“It makes it so much easier to retrieve that information geographically than always having to type in an address,” Cesanek adds. “I mean, how do you spell ‘Smith Street?’ You might type it in wrong. With GIS, though, you can find all the data you need connected to a map of your system.”
Cesanek is far from alone in praising GIS. And he, along with other engineers and consultants, says GIS software can help water officials more efficiently manage their water-treatment systems. Sure, municipalities will have to pay what can be steep upfront costs to equip their systems properly with GIS capability. But GIS, when used properly, provides municipal officials with more than enough benefits to outweigh these costs.
Just look at what water pros can rely on GIS for: They can use GIS to tackle customer complaints more efficiently; keep better track of repairs; guarantee that they will send out work crews only when absolutely necessary; and, perhaps most importantly, clearly identify the proper pipes and equipment they will need to serve new homeowners and businesses as their cities and towns grow.
A Tool to Rely On
Of course, GIS technology is growing in importance for several industries, not only those focusing on water treatment. The US Department of Labor issued a report in 2004 stating that the world market for geospatial technologies—estimated at $5 billion in 2001—would have grown to $30 billion by 2005.
The labor department also reported that its employment group that includes surveyors, cartographers, and surveying technicians, all of whom work in the geospatial industry, is expected to grow by 220,000 jobs by 2012. This ranks it as one of the 10 fastest-growing occupational groups.
The Greenwood County GIS is a good example of how municipalities are relying on this data-collection and -analysis tool. The Greenwood County GIS includes a collaboration of several municipal agencies in Greenwood County, SC, from the Greenwood Metropolitan District, which handles the treatment of wastewater for the district, to the Greenwood Commission of Public Works (CPW), which provides the county with treated drinking water.
County officials created the Greenwood County GIS System—its official name—in 2003. Today, engineers and managers with a host of agencies rely on it to quickly access information about the utilities serving the county’s residents.
The county’s GIS map, which can be accessed through either www.greenwoodcpw.com or www.greenwoodmetro.com, displays the location of houses and businesses, roads, trees, water pipes, sanitary sewers, gas lines, storm sewers, electrical lines, water mains, and water hydrants. County officials can study any number of these layers separately or in conjunction with others. For instance, an employee of the Greenwood CPW could view an electronic map showing only the county’s water mains and water hydrants. That same employee, though, could quickly change the map so that it shows mains, hydrants, tree lines, and nearby residences.
There are countless uses for such a map, say Greenwood County municipal officials.
“We may be able to find, for instance, that a property owner is encroaching on our right of way,” said Marion Boone, abatement manager with the Greenwood Metropolitan District. “We can use our maps to determine what kind of clearance we have between our line and the edge of the structures around it.”
The main benefit of the Greenwood County GIS System, though, is that it helps both the county’s water-treatment and wastewater-treatment systems operate more efficiently.
The Greenwood Metropolitan District has tied its preventative-maintenance schedule into its GIS. This way, district workers know exactly when they need to work on a particular section of the wastewater-treatment system. But the GIS can also be invaluable when an emergency arises.
If debris plugs up one of the system’s lines, employees can quickly access their GIS to see what other neighborhoods and lines have been impacted. They can then determine the amount of time they have before nearby pipes start overflowing. “The first thing we’ve been using the system for is to locate all our manholes and chart that information so our employees can quickly see it,” says George Martin, assistant manager with the Greenwood Metropolitan District. “We can then see how the surrounding elevations may impact the performance of our system. We can see the pipe slopes in between our manholes. That gives us important information about how they will react to heavy rains and other weather events. It’s a snapshot of what our system looks like. It’s impossible to maintain what you don’t know.”
Of course, the GIS won’t work if this information isn’t inputted into it. So far, the Greenwood Metropolitan District has made great strides in this. Employees had identified and input the location of all but about 50 of the system’s 8,500 manholes as of the middle of February.
The system also helps save the district money when repair work is needed, Martin says. For instance, with a quick check of the GIS, repair crews can discover if a damaged sewer line is located in the middle of a residential neighborhood or in a thick patch of woods.
If the problem is located in a residential backyard, crews would arrive onsite with a smaller easement machine, one that could fit through the limited gated entrance a typical backyard might have. This saves crews time that could be wasted if they had instead arrived with a larger piece of machinery, Martin says.
County officials rely, too, on GIS to help in planning future expansions of their system, Boone says. Say a property owner has petitioned authorities to build a new home on a lot that is currently unoccupied. By consulting the county GIS, wastewater department officials can determine immediately how close the property is to any existing sewer lines. Will the department need to install a new extension line to connect the property? Is there enough slope and grade to allow gravity to move wastewater from the new residence to connecting lines? Or will the wastewater department have to conduct more onsite investigation to come up with new solutions for handling the added parcel?
“Basically, it’s a great tool for estimating,” Martin says. “It allows you to go into the field with the exact information on what you’ll need to complete a job. You know immediately whether you are looking at a $5,000 job or a $50,000 job.”
Expanding Its Offerings
Working for one of the major global engineering, consulting, and construction companies, the engineers with Black & Veatch are adept at recognizing their clients’ needs.
And now, according to these engineers, clients are frequently demanding powerful GIS applications to help them run their utilities more efficiently.
Recognizing this, Black & Veatch is expanding the GIS services it offers within its global-water business. Paul Ginther is the new head of the water business’s GIS department and is currently working to expand this sector of Black & Veatch’s business. According to a company press release, Black & Veatch’s GIS department is now focusing on expanding the range of geospatial services it offers to better support its clients. The department will also work to promote a better understanding among its clients of the many uses for GIS-related programs.
In a telephone interview, Ginther explained that even though a growing number of utility managers are now aware of GIS and how it can help them do their jobs better, the water industry has yet to fully grasp all the benefits that the technology can provide.
“We do a lot of work with helping utilities improve their GIS, especially with a lot of the older networks,” Ginther says. “Some of these utilities relying on older networks are currently facing a lot of integrity issues with their water-distribution systems. They are facing some asset concerns. Their pipes are getting old. They have a lot of problem areas. They may use their GIS to go through their records, to see just how old their pipes are, to see when certain pipes were put in, but they find that their GIS is not as sophisticated as they had hoped.”
The challenge occurs when water system managers don’t know exactly how old their pipes are, or what type of pipes are located in the various subsections of their system. If that information was never properly recorded, or if the records have been lost over time, engineers can’t load their GIS with the information they need to function most effectively.
This information is needed for effective hydrologic modeling. By using GIS, water officials can study water-usage trends and combine that with information about the size and age of the pipes in their system and their location to determine their treatment systems’ future needs. GIS can also help department officials analyze pressure zones to make sure water pressure will be strong enough to fight fires in a given area.
Armed with this information, department officials can better plan for future system expansions. For instance, if an undeveloped section of the city is zoned for high-rise office buildings, department officials can tap into their GIS to see if the water pressure in that section of the water-treatment system will be strong enough to support the higher water-usage needs of multitenant office buildings. The water pressure, though, doesn’t have to be as high if that same section of the city is instead zoned for single-family dwellings.
There are times, then, when engineers with Black & Veatch have to help their water-department clients make assumptions about the age, size, and type of pipes. When actual records don’t exist, it’s important to instead rely on evidence-based assumptions.
“We can look at the housing development that the system is serving there. What year were the homes built? You make an assumption based on that information on what types of pipes they would have most likely installed at the time,” Ginther says. “You can also run queries, listing the pipe attributes throughout the system, and use GIS tools to look at specific attributes of the pipes adjacent to it. If you see that there’s a cast-iron pipe installed on both sides of an unknown pipe, and that these pipes were all installed at about the same time, chances are that there is another cast-iron pipe between them.”
When making assumptions, though, clients should flag the results differently in their GIS. This shows department engineers and workers that though the best guesses were made in identifying a certain pipe, the data are still not 100% certain.
“Two years from now, when people are looking at the data, they can see where it came from,” Ginther says. “They can see if it was based on an assumption or if it was based on harder data. The flags on the database tell us where the information came from. We are never going to be perfectly in sync. There are always a lot of assumptions that you have to make in hydrologic models. Basically, you want to make the hydrologic models as simple as you can, and the GIS as complex as you can. Sometimes there are conflicts between the two.”
A Variety of Uses
Ginther doesn’t hesitate when asked to give an example of how GIS software can help a utility better serve its customers. Black & Veatch is providing consulting and GIS services to a public utility—whose name Ginther cannot release—that operates about 24 wells that provide its customers with 90% of their treated drinking water. Several of the wells have low levels of contaminants, though they all still meet federal guidelines.
Members of the public, though, weren’t necessarily appeased that the wells met these guidelines. They were more concerned about the fact that the wells had any contaminants at all. Many clients, then, wanted to know where their own personal supply of drinking water came from. In other words, how much water were their homes receiving from any of the wells with the low levels of contaminants?
The utility turned to GIS and Black & Veatch for help. The challenge was that homes in the system never do receive all their drinking water from one specific well, Ginther says. At any given time, a home may be getting water from five or six different wells.
“There are fluctuations in a closed system like this,” Ginther says. “During the winter you have less usage, so the utility shuts off some of the wells. Other wells run maybe five or six hours a day and are then shut off depending upon demand. There are all these different scenarios at different times of the year and day.”
To provide clients with at least some idea from which wells their drinking water came, the utility used GIS software and hydrologic modeling to determine the percentage of water flow at key intersections of the distribution system. From that information, the utility used its GIS software to track the customers served by each of these key intersections.
Black & Veatch then worked with the utility to develop an online application that allows the utility’s clients to log onto the Internet, type in their address, and then learn, for example, that they are receiving 20% of their water from one well, 10% from another, and 70% from a third, at this time. The “at this time” portion is important: These percentages change depending on what time of day the client logs on, what season it happens to be, and several other variables. The clients can then use the online application to determine the quality of water flowing from each of the wells.
“We had to come up with all these percentages and scenarios,” Ginther says. “We had to make sure to explain to the clients that it’s not necessarily going to be from 9 a.m. to noon that you are receiving all your water from one specific well. It switches during the day. It’s a blending. That was a challenge in equating that back to individual addresses. To do all this, we primarily used GIS.”
Ginther has also seen utilities rely on GIS to save significant amounts of money. For instance, a utility may, thanks to GIS, gather enough evidence to put off repairing certain sections of piping for several years. Without supporting data provided through GIS, the utility may instead have spent a portion of its limited dollars on repairing pipes that didn’t need maintenance for 10 years or more.
Here’s how it works: Say utility crews are frequently sent out to deal with water-main breaks at a certain intersection. Based on the number of repair calls, utility officials may order the street dug up and the pipes replaced.
But what if utility officials called up that particular section of their system on their computers and found, thanks to the database they created as part of their GIS applications, that the pipes at that particular intersection are actually quite small? That may change the thinking of utility officials. Small pipes are more likely to suffer breaks and leaks than stronger, larger ones. But these breaks, while more frequent, cause far fewer problems because less water is pumped through smaller pipes. By tapping into their GIS, utility officials have discovered that the intersection, while in need of some repair work in the future, can go for a few more years without major work. The utility’s crews can then tackle a more immediate problem.
Utility officials can also use GIS to quickly determine if a portion of the system is serving important buildings such as hospitals or schools. Maybe a major break in one portion of the system would only flood a largely uninhabited wooded area, but the same break in an area 3 miles away would flood a major traffic intersection. Utility officials can take this information to better schedule repair work, solving problems that are potentially more troublesome before moving on to less serious issues, Ginther says.
“Flooding onto an interstate will cause more disruption than will flooding out in a little neighborhood,” Ginther says. “You can use GIS to help analyze this kind of information. It can help you put various risk factors to potential problems. Utilities can then come up with a weighting formula that helps them analyze which pipes to replace first, which sections of the system are priorities.”
Use on the Rise
A majority of water departments now use at least some form of GIS. Sean Johnson, account manger for the Pacific Northwest region of ESRI, a national company that specializes in GIS software, estimates that nearly all large municipalities use GIS in some way, while an increasing number of smaller cities and towns have also added mapping software to their systems.
The problem is, these municipalities are only using the most basic of GIS services, Johnson says. “Typically where we find water utilities using our software is for the operations and management of their utilities,” explains Johnson. “They are using it on a departmental level. But GIS has the ability to tie into all types of corporate applications and databases. You can tie GIS into corporate databases, customer-information systems, and SCADA [supervisory control and data acquisition] systems. This is the next step that utilities should be taking.”
Here’s an example of what Johnson believes utilities should be doing: Utility managers can turn to GIS to determine the most efficient ways to expand their water-distribution systems to generate increased revenue. They would merely need to overlay their utility’s GIS database of their system’s infrastructure with population estimates from the US Census Bureau. Water department officials could then look at the five- and 10-year population estimates to determine where growth is most likely to happen in a given jurisdiction.
Department planners can then identify current areas that may now have low density but will have a high number of new buildings in the next five to 10 years and plan accordingly, Johnson says.
“I talk to my clients about the fact that GIS is an integrating technology,” Johnson says. “It’s not only the mapping of the water facilities themselves; it’s taking that information and tying it to a common operating procedure, to all business functions and databases throughout the organization.”
The Otay Water District, a public water and sewer agency serving several communities in southeastern San Diego County, has been using GIS software for seven years. Today, officials with the district say, they can’t imagine running their water-distribution and -treatment systems without its help.
“We rely on GIS to be the foundation for all the land and facilities data we have,” says Geoff Stevens, chief information officer with the district. “GIS is the keeper of all the data related to our land and our entire infrastructure.”
The water district uses its GIS software to detect leaks in the many pipes that snake through its system. District crews can then use GIS to locate all of the different pipes that are connected to those that are leaking. Repair technicians, then, know exactly what valve to shut off when fixing the leaks.
Before the introduction of GIS? This whole process was more of a guessing game. “We’d have to rely on local knowledge, of if someone remembered what pipes were connected to what,” Stevens says. “They may have turned off a bigger valve than they would have needed to. They may have shut down a large area instead of a smaller area that would have isolated the problem.”
But GIS also helps the district integrate information from the various departments of the water district, everything from maintenance to customer billing. The Otay district, for example, is currently undertaking significant debt refinancing. During this process, district officials have learned that its debt can be used to cover future maintenance costs. By using GIS software, district officials can determine the specific geographic areas most in need of maintenance that would qualify for future funding.
Using GIS in this way, by tying together information from different aspects of a water system, gives water departments an advantage they never have possessed, Stevens says.
“Really, it’s quite remarkable in terms of its potential to be an enterprise system,” Stevens says. “GIS allows you to ask questions with geography. You can ask map-like questions of your assets, and that’s quite a useful ability.”