Water Sector Reform #3: Smart Systems
Sewer inspectors: Old School & New School
With a major federal investment in water infrastructure possibly on the horizon, the United States has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to leverage that money into a structural transformation of America’s water sector. This is the third in a series of five posts outlining broad proposals to rebuild the management, governance, and regulation of U.S. drinking water, sewer, and stormwater systems. The first proposed reform was consolidation of water utilities; the second was an overhaul of financial regulation for water systems.
My third proposed reform is a leap forward in water system infrastructure with comprehensive deployment of information technology to help manage systems more efficiently and effectively.
Wood, Brick, Iron
Most of America’s water systems operate 19th- and mid-20th century technology. In many ways that’s fine—if they were well-built and properly maintained, supply and distribution systems built long ago can continue to function well. Treatment techniques developed in the 1970s and 1980s still basically work (emerging contaminants notwithstanding), and environmental engineers continue to make important advances that improve human health and environmental conditions.
A downside of buried infrastructure is that it it’s often hard to know when systems are at risk of failing. For outsiders to the water sector, it can be surprising that many utility managers know very little about the condition of the systems that they run. Too many have no idea about the conditions of their systems: where the leaks are, which parts are most likely to fail, where the contamination dangers are. In a lot of places basic water sampling procedures haven’t changed much since the late 1990s or even the 1970s.
Water operators, not archaeologists
Sometimes a main break is the first time anyone is aware that there is a problem brewing. Every week or two there’s a story in a local newspaper about a utility that’s doing some maintenance and stumbles upon some relic from more than a century ago that shows just how antiquated our systems are. Old pipes lose enormous volumes of drinking water, and can cause sewage overflows during rainy weather.
Bits & bytes
Over the past twenty years we’ve seen an explosion in the information technology available to monitor water quality and infrastructure conditions in real time, and many utilities have been working hard to put new information systems in place.
SCADA* systems now allow water system operators to track and control remote facilities electronically. Remote sensing technology designed to detect water on Mars has been adapted to help satellites detect leaky water systems here on Earth. Autonomous robots from companies like Redzone** and Inuktun** can do the underground work of system inspection and repair without the cost and danger of putting operators down manholes. New sensor technology from companies like Xylem** and RealTech** allows comprehensive flow and water quality monitoring throughout an entire system, delivering real-time information about infrastructure conditions and threats to health or security. Big data analytics can be used to model and predict system disruptions and avert crises. There's a whole conference for just this stuff! I'm not an expert on these things (I'm a social scientist, for goodness sake), but these are heady days for the development of information technology in the water sector.
But uptake of advanced information technology in the water sector has been agonizingly slow. Water utilities are conservative organizations. In general risk aversion is a good thing in the water sector; we wouldn’t want riverboat gamblers operating our critical infrastructure. The reasons for slow diffusion of technology are many. One is that change is costly and risky. Another is that too many of the organizations that operate water systems lack the organizational capacity or literal bandwidth to take advantage of these technologies—systems with two operators and fewer than a thousand customers probably aren’t investing heavily in remote sensing and big data infrastructure.
Build the future, not the past
If the U.S. federal government is going to make a massive investment in the water sector†, then let’s get our systems out of the 19th and 20th centuries and into the 21st and 22nd. An infusion of federal capital should support development and deployment of smart system technology in the water sector.
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*Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition
**I'm not specifically endorsing any of these companies; I don't even know anyone who works for them. I just think this kind of stuff is really cool.
†Water infrastructure remains a hot topic with ambitious politicians.
© 2019 Manny P. Teodoro