Meeting the challenges of sewerage pollution

The UK gov­ern­ment has made it clear to water sup­pli­ers in Eng­land that they need to do more to pro­tect the envi­ron­ment from pol­lu­tion. George Hey­wood, head of ana­lyt­i­cal inno­va­tion at Ovar­ro, says bet­ter analy­sis of exist­ing data can quick­ly reduce the risk of pol­lu­tion from burst pipes.

A gov­ern­ment strate­gic state­ment released Feb. 2, 2022, out­lines the reg­u­la­tor’s pri­or­i­ties for the next five years. It calls for action to “reduce dam­age from flood­ing, improve and make more trans­par­ent the mon­i­tor­ing and report­ing of pol­lu­tion inci­dents, address agri­cul­tur­al runoff, and pro­tect the health of our rivers and seas.”

The state­ment came days after a U.K. water com­pa­ny was pros­e­cut­ed in Jan­u­ary 2022 fol­low­ing a pol­lu­tion inci­dent in 2017. The com­pa­ny was fined £233,000 for dis­charg­ing waste­water from a ris­ing main into a water body for four days.

Rising pipes

Ris­ers — pres­sur­ized pipes that pump waste­water from a pump­ing sta­tion to a treat­ment plant — are high-risk, crit­i­cal assets, but as many in the U.K. age and become more prone to pipe bursts, exist­ing proac­tive main­te­nance and invest­ment pro­grams may not be enough to keep up with the pace of deterioration.

In Octo­ber 2021, anoth­er water util­i­ty launched a five-day emer­gency response, deploy­ing tankers and cleanup crews to lim­it the impact on cus­tomers after a rup­tured ris­er flood­ed a res­i­den­tial neighborhood.

With increas­ing pres­sure from cus­tomers and stake­hold­ers and a com­mit­ment from water util­i­ties to reduce pol­lu­tion, it is not sur­pris­ing that they are work­ing with the sup­ply chain to devel­op inno­v­a­tive solu­tions. One exam­ple from the com­pa­ny is Burst­De­tect, a cloud-based ear­ly warn­ing sys­tem devel­oped in col­lab­o­ra­tion with UK util­i­ties that is a direct response to the urgent chal­lenge of reduc­ing pollution.

The tool detects ris­ing line breaks that can lead to pol­lu­tion inci­dents. Through a dash­board, it pro­vides an overview of pump sta­tion sta­tus, as well as cur­rent and his­tor­i­cal events. When data indi­cates a poten­tial pipe break, an alert is sent to con­trol cen­ters, often with­in an hour of the occurrence.

This ensures that users can make quick, informed deci­sions and quick­ly allo­cate resources to reduce envi­ron­men­tal impact. Such ear­ly inter­ven­tion can pre­vent sewage spills and the result­ing envi­ron­men­tal dam­age, ensur­ing that com­pa­nies meet their envi­ron­men­tal oblig­a­tions and avoid fines, reg­u­la­to­ry penal­ties and crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion, as well as long-term rep­u­ta­tion­al damage.

Training and testing approach

Burst­De­tect can be deployed in almost any pump­ing sta­tion — even those with only basic pump con­di­tion mon­i­tor­ing — and requires no addi­tion­al hard­ware, aim­ing for 100% cov­er­age of mon­i­tored net­works. The sys­tem accepts data at a range of mon­i­tor­ing fre­quen­cies, apply­ing algo­rithms to under­stand and char­ac­ter­ize the “nor­mal” behav­ior of pump stations.

This approach of “train­ing and test­ing” machine learn­ing is becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to water util­i­ties as it pro­vides them with more action­able insights than ever before by lever­ag­ing data that oth­er­wise may not have been ful­ly utilized.

With the vast amount of data avail­able from the water and waste­water net­work, it is sim­ply not pos­si­ble for humans to process and ana­lyze the infor­ma­tion them­selves. Hav­ing the right tech­nol­o­gy and process­es in place will set the stage for util­i­ties to rapid­ly improve their real-time and pre­dic­tive capa­bil­i­ties. This will help them regain the trust of cus­tomers and reg­u­la­tors, and ensure bet­ter pro­tec­tion of valu­able waterways.