“Did they record the street wrong or get the pipe length wrong?” Reconciling these inconsistencies and digitizing the files is expensive and time-consuming, she said. “They’re in crisis mode all the time.”, Brett writes about agriculture, energy, infrastructure, and the politics and economics of water in the United States. If you simply used the age of pipes as a way to prioritize which city blocks should be replaced first, only 5 percent of the top 50 water mains on your list would go on to break in the next 3 years. Like a child, AI can learn bad things if the data is not good.” — Sunil Sinha, Virginia Tech. Tracking breaks is like tracking heart attacks, he said. first place for explanatory reporting for a series on septic system pollution in the United States, The Stream, October 8, 2020: The Clean Water Act Isn’t Being Enforced In the Midwest, Says Report, The Stream, October 7, 2020: Hurricane Delta Upgrades to Category 4 Storm Prior to Hitting Mexico, House Democrats Ask CDC to Halt Water Shutoffs during the Pandemic, The Stream, October 6, 2020: MI Clean Water Plan Aims To Upgrade Michigan Water Infrastructure, For five consecutive years, water professionals surveyed by the American Water Works Association have ranked replacement of aging infrastructure as the industry’s top challenge, Artificial intelligence and machine learning, combined with utility pipe-break archives and data about environmental factors like flow rates, soil chemistry, and temperature can pinpoint which pipes are most likely to fail and thus are the best candidates for replacement, Only one out of five utilities surveyed last year by the American Water Works Association said that they use data mining to improve the operation and maintenance of their water and sewer systems. These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience. They read the American Water Works Association pipe replacement report and saw an opportunity in the water sector. But what works for East Bay MUD and San Francisco PUC might not apply elsewhere. To leave good pipe in the ground as long as possible is economically important.” — Katie Miller, San Francisco PUC. In the real world, the DSSG model quickly proved itself, at least anecdotally. To test different models, they trained them on past data and attempted to “predict the past” — for example, using data from 2010-2012 to predict water main breaks in 2013-14. The information provided is limited to the best available data in DC Water’s possession at the time the dataset was loaded. The Stream, January 25: Tehran, Iran, Sinking at Alarming Rates Due to Groundwater... Click to enable/disable google analytics tracking. To display water main break details, zoom in and click on one of the points. In the months following the partnership, we've seen that the model they built is giving us intelligence about the water system that supplements the knowledge of the crews that attend to it every day. The long-term target is 40 miles per year. The trade organization also estimates that the replacement tab for America’s water pipes will run close to $1 trillion over 25 years. Going by past breaks alone, you would never predict any breaks that have previously had less than three water mains breaks, and replacement efforts would only focus on a handful of neighborhoods. Though San Francisco PUC generally has high quality data, it wasn’t until recently that it was complete, consistent, and accessible, Miller said.