water
by Karen Stewart
Sustainable water &
wastewater management
through GIS
A reliable source of water that
meets high quality standards is an
indispensable resource for a healthy
Canadian society. A recent Statistics
Canada report states that, in 2006, 86
percent of Canadian households were
receiving their water from a municipal
water supply; yet, we face a national
infrastructure deficit estimated at $123
billion.
Most Canadian water and waste-
water assets have reached the 50-year
mark, and it is feared that Canada
may be facing an infrastructure crisis,
exasperated by population growth,
delayed maintenance, rising repair
costs, and the continuous emergence
of new regulations. With this in mind,
Canadian municipalities are putting
more emphasis on the work required
to maintain their current infrastructure
and conduct long-term planning well
into the future.
How can a municipality keep
up with growing demand, plan for
sustainability and ensure regulatory
compliance? A crucial component lies
in developing an accurate inventory
of underground assets and their future
capital maintenance requirements over
time. While most municipalities have a
clear outlook on the condition of their
above ground treatment facilities, it is
more difficult to maintain an inventory
Karen Stewart is the Public Works Industry Manager for ESRI Canada. She
has a Bachelor of Technology Degree in Geomatics, specializing in GIS, and
has over 25 years experience in the municipal/utility mapping, GIS and public
works fields. She can be reached at .
of the underground network that dis-
tributes water or gathers wastewater.
Traditionally, municipalities often
relied on computer-aided drafting
(CAD) technology to automate, organ-
ize, and draft map data pertaining to
their underground assets. Although
CAD plays an important role in the
asset lifecycle, this graphics-based
method of representing data offers
limited functionality for analyzing
spatial relationships between assets,
and modeling the impact of future
development. As a result, many mu-
nicipalities are turning to geographic
information system (GIS) technology
because it stores relationships among
spatial objects and includes an asset's
attributes – images of the asset and
location coordinate – offering an ideal
structure for underground infrastruc-
ture management.
Meeting Needs of
Growing Community
York Region, one of the fast-
est growing regions in Canada, has
recently leveraged GIS technology
to develop a central repository that
contains critical information for all
of its linear water and wastewater
systems. Historically, the region had
been restricted by a manual process of
managing infrastructure data. With a
population that has almost quadrupled
in the last 40 years, they recognized an
immediate need to streamline business
processes.
Given that GIS enables information
to be viewed in a mapping environ-
ment, rather than simply rows or col-
umns of data, the region benefits from
reviewing spatial relationships be-
tween a growing number of assets and
asset classes, such as water and waste-
water. The impact of factors such as
population growth and road conditions
can also be analyzed for future capital
planning. Data is updated whenever
there is new construction and made
available to field crews who can locate
watermains and sewers through mobile
tablets, then communicate data anoma-
lies to editors back at the office.
To improve the efficiency of track-
ing new construction, the region
recently automated the process of cap-
turing and uploading CAD data. Previ-
ously, hard copies of as-built drawings
would be scanned, georeferenced and
then manually digitized into the data-
base. With the new web-based system,
digital submissions received from con-
tractors must be created using a com-
mon standard. This enables the region
to automate the extraction of feature
and attribute information during the
design and construction phase. The
data is quality-controlled through a
number of processes and automatically
uploaded to the central database, sav-
ing editors at least a week of manual
data entry and digitizing per contract.
The new system has significantly
improved data quality and simplified
May 2011 Municipal World 11
