How tech is helping communities ease their water worries

LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA — Water is rarely far from the headlines, especially in recent times as hackers linked to Iran attacked systems across multiple states.

But at the International City/County Management Association’s annual meeting last week, two communities highlighted how they are using technology for other aspects of water management. While these efforts may not grab all the headlines, they still have a tremendous impact for their residents and ratepayers.

Sugar Land, Texas, a city of just over 110,000 people southwest of Houston, uses technology in its Integrated Stormwater Management Model — known as ISWMM — to predict where streets may flood during rainstorms, plan evacuation alerts and where first responders may be needed, as well as how to better prepare and plan for the next weather event.

Meanwhile, Glencoe, Illinois, a village just north of Chicago, has introduced sensors to monitor for breaks in its water mains and other service lines, in a bid to cut back on wasted water in its community of just under 9,000 residents.

These efforts and more show how local governments nationwide are trying to better manage their water and other critical infrastructure systems and use technology to do so, especially as the budget to fully replace those aging systems is not there.

“This is the ultimate quality of life issue,” Glencoe Village Manager Philip Kiraly said during a panel discussion at the ICMA meeting. “When we think about what our communities provide, you can be a community without a police department, you can be a community without a fire department, you can be a community without a parks and recreation department, but turn off the water and nobody's there. It is truly the most basic quality of life issue.”

Stormwater in Sugar Land

Sugar Land has a flat elevation and is close to both the Brazos River and Oyster Creek, both of which are prone to bursting their banks during heavy rain. This combination of factors means Sugar Land has traditionally struggled with water storage and release, as well as making decisions about where to close roads, evacuate and deploy public safety units to help coordinate the response.

City leaders looked to deal with that in 2017, when they upgraded Sugar Land’s ISWMM to a website app, then a couple of years later imported rainfall data and made a limited amount of that data available to the public. Rainfall data includes projections and historical patterns for two-, five-, 10-, 25-, 100- and 500-year rain events, which can be studied to see where streets and other facilities have ponding, which is the accumulation of water that does not drain away quickly.

By combining that rainfall data with expected impacts on streets, local leaders can better plan their responses for events that occur, and learn from what’s happened before. That includes a flood on Tax Day in 2016, as well as a 2019 storm that dropped nine inches of rain on the city in six hours and Hurricane Harvey in 2017.

“The interface itself is not the important point; it's the ability to connect real-time measurement into an anticipated impact,” Robert Wilson, an assistant city engineer for Sugar Land, said during a session at ICMA’s conference. “That ultimately is what flood intelligence means. A number on a gauge is just data, but understanding what that gauge means for a road, park, pump station, or neighborhood is intelligence. This tool gives us the ability to run a scenario, see what the flooding extent is anticipated to be, and create a response plan for when that scenario occurs.”

Wilson said this technology and planning tool is just one component, however, as it cannot predict freak events like infrastructure failures, nor can its projections be relied upon as “absolute truth.” But it helps planning become more proactive and less reactive to events, as it gives the city at least an idea of where they can expect to send resources during a future storm, and do so quicker.

“This changes the posture of the organization,” Wilson said. “Instead of waiting around for a resident to call and tell us where the water is in the street, we can begin preparing for where the water is likely to happen. This is our difference between response information and predictive information.”

Fix the leaks in Glencoe

Glencoe, like other towns and cities in Illinois that draw their water out of Lake Michigan, must report to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources how much of that water is wasted. In 2015, the state had a target of 12% water loss, then revised it down to 10% in 2019. At one stage, Glencoe officials estimated they were losing 30% of their water, so they needed to make a change.

First, the city paid to replace the water meters of its 8,900 residents and businesses. While that showed a slight deceleration in water loss, the number soon climbed back up once again. So Kiraly and Monica Sarna, the city’s public works director, decided to act further.

They created the city’s Leak Detection Program, which deploys more than 190 acoustic monitoring sensors that feed into a central dashboard. Those sensors record when noise happens throughout the system, which can indicate a main break beneath the surface that needs to be fixed. Crews then go out into the field with a mobile device to confirm a leak and then begin repairs before water is further wasted and it starts flooding the street above.

Sarna said there has been a significant “learning curve” with this technology, even as it has proven to be successful in identifying 33 leaks before they surfaced and even helped find leaks in lead service lines to homes that have then been replaced.

“There are many things that could produce a false alarm: if you have a road plate or a steel plate on the road, traffic may produce an alert based on the sound it's producing, any nearby pumps, irrigation systems — there's a variety of things that could cause a false alarm,” she said.

Officials look at numbers that indicate the level and spread of the noise, which show how intense the noise is and how consistent it is. If both numbers are high, that is more likely to indicate a leak than, say, normal operations for a golf course irrigation system.

There will always be a certain amount of water loss, Kiraly said, and it is impossible to cover the cost of upgrading century-old water systems even as water rates continue to rise with “no end in sight.” 

Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated in 2023 that drinking water systems alone would need $625 billion in upgrades, which Kiraly said he believes is a low estimate given that a water main break happens on average every two minutes nationwide.

This effort, which cost the city $450,000 but has resulted in saving 500,000 gallons of water a day on average, has also helped reduce workers’ overtime cost from fixing leaks and also will help ensure compliance with state law.

“I think it is just an opportunity to get a better sense and handle on a piece of your infrastructure that is hard to understand until it breaks,” Sarna said. “We all know when the system breaks, it breaks very effectively, very visibly, and you get [a] geyser [in the street]. But this is finding those ways to deal with quiet issues that can literally take years to surface, and so even small amounts of deployment in a system can reap benefits and rewards for you.”