Home to 1.6 million people, Broward must manage its water supply closely, thanks to the extremes in the weather cycle, and it must make sure the water quality remains high. Like so many fast-developing jurisdictions, the situation isn't getting better. The county expects its population to reach 2 million by 2020 and water use to more than double by the same time -- to 360 million gallons per day from the current rate of 155 million gallons per day.
All that growth will put a strain on maintaining water quality and infrastructure in Broward. Without a good management program, pollution problems could arise, and with them, costly remedies. But Broward has a top-notch water monitoring program in operation, and part of its success is due to mobile technology.
Since 2001, the county's Department of Planning and Environmental Protection has used POSSE -- a work management system running on mobile computers -- to monitor underground storage tanks. Every day, inspectors fan out into the field, conducting inspections and inputting valuable data on their laptops. At the end of the day, reports are posted to the department's servers, and customers -- storage tank owners -- have access to the reports over the Internet.
The new application has improved worker productivity and slashed the use of paperwork, according to Jeffrey Halsey, environmental licensing manager for the department. The system works so well that Florida is pursuing a similar statewide program, he said.
You would expect Broward County -- which sits on a single source aquifer and Florida -- with its heavy reliance on groundwater for drinking, to have aggressive water-monitoring programs. But water monitoring and its related costs are growing throughout the country.
There are 160,000 public drinking water systems in the United States serving 268 million people, according to the Environmental Protection Agency -- the majority are ground water systems, which are highly susceptible to pollution from leaking tanks and other sources.
As residential development grows and water distribution systems age, the cost of having clean drinking water grows. Water mains break more than 237,000 times each year in the United States, and cost estimates for rebuilding, repairing or replacing broken pipes and ageing water utility systems range from $151 billion to $1 trillion.
Broward County's mobile inspection system may seem like a minor cog in an enormous wheel, but technology -- especially the wireless variety -- is going to play an increasingly important role in helping to monitor problems and mitigate costly repairs.
Two cities in Utah have deployed water monitoring systems that rely on wireless technology. Salt Lake City and Park City use technology from the Hach Company and Wireless Systems Inc. that remotely measures water quality in real time and transmits the results to water officials.
This type of remote water monitoring is feasible thanks to use of control channels on cellular networks. Control channels are used for data transmission, and operate with considerable capacity to provide administrative services, such as billing, to the wireless carriers. They provide national coverage and operate at low cost. In recent years, a number of firms have begun using the control channel to provide reliable remote monitoring services to business firms.
Minding the Hardware
Aside from the water quality project in Utah, numerous cities are using wireless technology for remote monitoring of pipes, valves, meters and other parts of infrastructure that make up water utility systems. The city of Austin, Texas, has installed a wireless system to collect data from hundreds of flow meters throughout the city's wastewater collection system.
Austin evaluated a digital solution after running into signal, transmission and power problems with their original analog system, according to an article in the trade magazine, Water World.
On a much larger scale, the Hampton Road Sanitation District (HRSD) in Virginia Beach, Va., uses wireless technology to monitor pipe water pressure and flows throughout the region's sanitation system. HRSD operates nine major treatment plants and four smaller ones in an area that includes 17 counties and cities, and a population of 1.5 million.
The system's huge size makes it difficult to cost-effectively monitor all valves and hundreds of miles of pipes. To improve how it manages and monitors the sanitation system, HRSD installed MOSCAD, a waste water infrastructure management system from Motorola. A key component of MOSCAD is its wireless monitoring system, according to Ernie Rector, a data technician for HRSD.
"The main benefit is cost," he said. "We have such a large system and have to use as few people as possible for maintenance."
HRSD first began using MOSCAD in 1993 to transmit sensor data from pump stations and flow valves over a radio frequency network. Today, the system sends pressure and flow information daily from 22 sites to the nine treatment plants, which are now interconnected with T1 lines. MOSCAD can detect malfunctions and failures by sending out alarm messages. It also monitors pumps for possible obstructions and other changes that may affect its operation, including unauthorized entry at certain points.
Eventually HRSD hopes to use wireless to transmit data between maintenance workers in the field, who must cover a system that operates more than 3,100 square miles in southeastern Virginia, as well as the monitoring system that runs on HRSD's computers. But for now, MOSCAD has proven an effective system for monitoring the sanitation system's pumps, valves and pipes, according to Rector.
In Broward County, productivity is the main force driving the mobile inspection and monitoring system that Halsey oversees.
"In the past year, we've increased inspections by 17 percent using POSSE," he said. "And we've reduced the error on tank inspections down to 6 percent."
Inspectors -- who previously checked into the main office every morning to get their assignments, and returned each day to file paper reports -- now start work when they boot up their laptops at home and download schedules off the Internet via a virtual private network.
The inspectors create storage tank inspection reports while in the field and file them in PDF format, which can handle photographs well -- something inspectors often attach to their reports. The application is powered by iAnywhere Solutions, a subsidiary of database firm Sybase. IAnywhere handles the synchronization of data between field and department servers.
Halsey, who characterized the county's inspection program as "aggressive," has eliminated the most wasteful aspects of paperwork, while giving the department's customers much better service. "And it has improved the quality of our data by reducing error rates," he added.
The POSSE program, which cost the county $550,000, is used by the department for a variety of other purposes, including the licensing of hazardous materials, air quality systems and other pollution-related programs.
Eventually Halsey would like to add wireless to give inspectors more flexibility. But the current application is designed to use large PDF files, so inspectors would have difficulty filing their reports in a timely fashion. Therefore, Halsey said, the department will stick with its existing application using laptops for mobile purposes, and word is getting out.
"We've received calls from a number of states that have heard about our program," he said.
