BE Magazine - Volume 5, Issue 1 - (Page 31) GEOSPATIAL Fine-Tuned Water Flow The challenge: increase fire-fighting capacity without affecting critical water supply Supply System Service Capacity Improvement (WSSSCI) program to upgrade water mains in older suburbs to achieve higher firefighting capacities. An essential component of this program is that PROJECT OVERVIEW B risbane Water provides water and wastewater services to 1 million residents of Brisbane, Australia, and drinking water to an additional 1 million residents of southeast Queensland. In 2005, in response to a worsening drought and consequent water shortages in the region’s main reservoirs, Brisbane Water embarked on an accelerated leakage reduction program to increase water efficiency. Careful analysis and planning was required to ensure that the program would not adversely affect the water network’s firefighting capabilities. However, such planning needed to be completed rapidly over very wide areas of the city to underpin an intense multimillion dollar pressure and leakage management capital program. Brisbane Water’s pressure and leakage management program is based on the formation of discrete, small, flow-monitored areas called District Metered Areas (DMAs). These areas, of approximately 500–3,000 properties each, allow leaks to be more easily detectable and pinpointed to a small local area. Unfortunately, since a DMA requires previously open valves to be shut, this can significantly degrade fire-fighting capacity without boundary valve optimization and additional water main upgrades. In addition, since the early part of the decade, Brisbane Water has been implementing a separate multimillion dollar Water Maintaining Water Network Fire-Fighting Capacity Organization Brisbane Water BE Awards Category Geospatial Water Resources Management Project Objective Ensure the delivery of the pressure and leakage management program and maintain the Brisbane water network fire-fighting capacity detailed hydraulic modeling be conducted to pinpoint where upgrades are best targeted. The WSSSCI project also required quick and efficient desktop planning and modeling. Enter WaterGEMS Brisbane Water concluded that it was in a situation where numerous and frequent fire-flow modeling simulations were required to support two large capital programs, in addition to the normal planning workload, but did not have the software or the systems to do so without incurring large overheads in staff time and costs and potentially significant project delays. In light of the looming drought, this was unacceptable. Brisbane Water required a software solution that could minimize the time and effort required for fire-fighting analysis. The organization conducted trials on numerous water-network modeling packages. After exhaustive reviews and some project trials, Brisbane Water decided on WaterGEMS. Ben Wilson, water and sewerage planner at Brisbane Water, explained, “The implementation of WaterGEMS was combined with a parallel program of system improvement, particularly in checking and correcting the underlying GIS data and process automation. As part of this effort, the Network Navigator connectivity checking tools of WaterGEMS found and corrected the majority of GIS connectivity errors to which fire-flow analysis models are extremely sensitive. The implementation of the software was an v Brisbane Water engineers were able to identify the critical fire-flow points and code by color and size unqualified success.” Volume 5, Issue 1 | BE MAGAZINE 31
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