Innovation in Water, Wastewater, and Stormwater Networks

With precious clean drinking water disappearing into the ground every year from deteriorated and leaky municipal water pipes, water loss reduction is a global challenge. Projects in this category demonstrate excellence in planning, designing, building, operating, modeling, and analyzing, water, wastewater, or stormwater networks.

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Winner

Government of Maharashtra, Water Supply and Sanitation Department
Crisis Management of Water Supply in Developing Countries
Maharashtra, India

When a Supreme Court ruling restricted water distribution from the Krishna River in the state of Maharashtra, India, water supply to the region was cut off every Friday, affecting 17 million people in the Mumbai metropolitan area. Although service was restored on Saturdays, it took up to 30 hours for water to reach some areas. This situation caused civil unrest in 13 municipalities.

To mitigate the crisis, the water department developed a hydraulic model that allowed engineers to locate the problem and design a solution. Using WaterGEMS, Bentley Map, and Bentley Water, the modeling was accomplished quickly and efficiently. The team created scenarios for re-engineering the system, which then enabled corrective measures. As a result, the 30-hour lag time was eliminated, which otherwise would be needed to bring in water tankers. This resulted in 4.7 billion INR savings.

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Finalist

ISKI Genel Mudurlugu
The ISKABISpatial–Spatial Management of Infrastructure
Istanbul, Turkey

In Istanbul, Turkey, the water, wastewater, and stormwater infrastructure totals about 27,500 kilometers, with more than 500 facilities and 1.3 million buildings. Although ISKI’s infrastructure information system consisted of file server-based CAD data and linked attributes, challenges included lack of data synchronization among distributed servers and the inability to control access and modification. Moreover, querying the whole system was difficult.

To overcome these constraints, ISKI built ISKABISpatial, a CAD-based GIS data production, analysis, and reporting platform. Data management tools for water, wastewater, and stormwater were programmed in MicroStation VBA, and existing data was migrated into Oracle Spatial running on top of MicroStation. All infrastructure data input and updates are now made via MicroStation, with the data transferring directly into Oracle 11g. Since ISKABISpatial has been implemented, ISKI has saved 70 to 90 percent of asset management expenses.

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Finalist

Manila Water Company
Network Improvement Master Plan of Metro Manila East Zone
Manila, Philippines

Before Manila Water Company could expand coverage south of Metro Manila and Rizal Provinces in the Philippines, the existing network in the central distribution system needed improvement. The system is supplied by two major transmission lines—one that is already overloaded and one that is not fully utilized. The $450 million network improvement program will solve this imbalance as well as ensure reliability in fringe areas prone to breakages, water theft, and illegal connections.

The master plan was designed by creating a hydraulic simulation model of the central distribution system using WaterGEMS. Through the model, network reliability projects were conceptualized on a per-business-area basis to ensure that they are consistent with development plans of the local governments. This process resulted in savings on both capital and operational expenditures.

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