AUTHORS: Kevin M. Gildea, Melisa Ennella, Christopher Kobos, William Selders - H2M Architects and Engineers
ABSTRACT: The components of a public water distribution system are commonly designed with a 100-year lifetime which requires water purveyors to replace approximately one-percent of their system annually to ensure optimal functionality and water quality. However, capital improvements in historically urban areas routinely encounter obstacles that make the projects difficult to execute. To compound the issue, constructed and existing assets are subsurface assets that are only visible for a timeframe of hours throughout their 100-year lifetime. Additionally, the 2017 enactment of the Water Quality Accountability Act (WQAA) in New Jersey requires all water purveyors to have a comprehensive asset management plan and geographic coordinates of all installed valves and fire hydrants based on GPS or other location technology. To solve the multitude of issues that water purveyors are faced with, H2M created a GIS-centric method of managing water distribution construction projects using ArcGIS Online, ArcMap, Survey123, and Collector by ESRI. The mobile technology provides H2M field engineers an interactive map to update on-site as assets are ‘daylighted’, structured field report generation via Survey123, and a file geodatabase with the client’s data schema for the addition of new assets with geographic coordinates to seamlessly enter into the client’s asset management system. The workflow and data schema can be modified to benefit a variety of clients working on infrastructure projects across multiple verticals.
