When floodwaters rise during an emergency situation, the resilience of water infrastructure is put to the test. Data from digital water meters can prove extremely valuable for making informed decisions to secure the water supply. Regional water utilities face many challenges during flood events and data pointing to leaks and breaks can make a real difference.
In late 2022, flooding in regional New South Wales put water supply at risk when bores around Weethalle, Tallimba and Naradhan got flooded causing an outage in that water scheme. Goldenfields Water, who manage the water supply for 46,000 customers across an area of 22,562 sq km, faced the extremely challenging task of maintaining water supply.
The first actions taken by Goldenfields Water in these areas with the flooded bores was to truck water in and implement high-level water restrictions, which limited customers to 100 litres of water per person daily. However, even with these measures in place the reservoir levels were still dropping.
The next challenge was that the amount of water being supplied had increased due to numerous new leaks and breaks caused by the heavy rainfall and flooding, and the demand could not be met.
Taggle to the rescue
Luckily, Goldenfields Water have Taggle Systems digital water meters installed at every property allowing the leaks to be quickly and easily identified. Goldenfields Water engineering manager Sammy Jung spoke about how the water meter data helped secure the water supply during the emergency.
“With Taggle’s equipment, we could identify specific customers who had huge leaks on their side of the meter and communicate directly with them which was a great success in reducing losses,” Jung said.
Taggle delivers hourly water usage data for its digital water meters and sensors. For Jung and Goldenfields Water, they could track where the water was going.
Network Leaks
“We knew we had significant leaks in both our water network and on customer properties,” said Jung. “To address the network leaks, we split the scheme into smaller pieces by turning some valves off,” she said. “We could then compare the quantity of water entering the supply network with what gets delivered to our customers and quantify how much water was being lost along the way.”
“Areas with the highest losses is where we focused our energy first and had staff patrol the water lines. This was extremely challenging with so much water on the ground and the extensive kilometers of pipeline network, but our teams quickly discovered significant bursts as part of this program,” said Jung.
Working with our customers
To address customer leaks, Jung and the team at Goldenfields Water worked through the leak report in Aqualus Water, Taggle’s meter data management software. “We contacted individual customers starting from the largest leaks,” said Jung.
“We also contacted some of the high-water users as it takes 48 hours for the system to classify the water use as a leak. When we spoke to them, many would say they only use water for the bare minimum requirements, as per the water restriction communications. That led to a conversation about leaks existing on their property.”
“Everyone was very appreciative of our efforts to save water and helped us in finding and fixing the leaks. We had customers walking up to two kilometres, trying to find a leak on the pipe between the meter and their home.”
Many of those customers were able to find the leaks and get them fixed, but some could not locate the leaks with so much water still around.” “Many of these customers agreed to have restrictors installed at their meter in the meantime, which allowed enough water to pass through to fulfil their daily requirements without wasting too much. This had a huge impact in securing our water supply,” said Jung.
“The flood emergency was extremely challenging, but we achieved incredible success in managing our water resources with the help of the meter data and the community,” she said.
What was learned in this emergency?
“This was the first time Goldenfields Water had experienced such an extreme weather event where the digital water meters played a role managing supplies. It provided us the opportunity to learn a lot from the experience,” said Jung.
“One thing we learned was about the accessibility of the data to different team members,” Jung said. “We now have more staff with system access who can benefit from the data and make informed decisions relative to their projects and tasks.”
“We also took a closer look at the Aqualus Water platform. We’ve had the system for over ten years and there are many functions we haven’t adopted into our workflow. For example, how to analyse that enormous amount of data from all meters and understanding environmental impacts on water use,” said Jung.
Goldenfields Water uses the data for modelling as well, it is helping them understand water consumption patterns. This builds into its predictions of future water demand, population growth and other information for the utility.
Ongoing partnership
“Goldenfields Water was an early adopter of Taggle’s technology, our deployment was over ten years ago now,” Jung said. “Taggle has grown a lot in the time that we have worked with them,” Jung said. “We are doing our best to keep up with their technology and all the functionality we can capitalise on.”
The Goldenfields Water digital meter fleet is now coming to end of life after ten years in the field. Plans are being made for the replacement program.
Taggle has been on site to work through the replacement program. “It’s been a great opportunity to learn more about the latest technology, new devices and functionality,” said Jung. “We’ve had a fair bit of staff turnover since the first install, so getting that knowledge base back through the door has been valuable. It will help staff better understand the system and how we can best serve our customers.”
Conclusion
After the emergency flood event, Goldenfields Water has gained many valuable insights and learnings and has willingly shared them with other Taggle customers and the wider community. Together we are stronger as we prepare for future emergencies and make the best use of data and resources to secure water supplies.
This article was first published in Inside Water Magazine
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