City of Corpus Christi, Texas, Chooses CapPlan Water for Smart Capital Planning

The City of Corpus Christi Water Department serves nearly 500,000 citizens of Corpus Christi and the Coastal Bend area of southeast Texas. The city maintains over 900,000 acre-feet (1.1 km3) of storage in two local reservoirs and supplements its supply from Lake Texana via a 101-mile (163-km) long, 64-in. (164-cm) diameter pipeline. The department annually treats 28 billion gallons (106 billion liters) of water and operates four pumping stations, five elevated storage tanks, and 1,600 miles (2,575 km) of water line.

 

“The Innovyze CapPlan Water software gives us the ability to make smarter rehab decisions,” said Mark Van Vleck, the city’s Deputy Water Director. “We can now utilize all our hydraulic modeling, GIS, and maintenance history to analyze both the likelihood and consequence of failure of every pipe in our system and understand our overall risk. The risk ratings allow us to prioritize the pipe replacements and ensure that every dollar spent by our capital program yields the maximum benefit to the community.”

 

CapPlan Water changes the way water utilities plan the relative phasing of system improvements by allowing users to assess both the probability and consequence of failure for each asset. Assets that affect system operation will normally rate high on the consequence scale, while assets in poor condition will have a high probability of failure.

 

Probability of failure is determined based on the pipe’s physical condition (structural integrity, age, material, roughness factor, leakage/break/defect history) and location (proximity to a seismic fault or construction zone) as well as its hydraulic performance characteristics (head loss, pressure, velocity). Consequence of failure draws on data such as water outages (schools, hospitals, critical care facilities); low- and no-water conditions; reduced fire protection capabilities; flooding, including structural damage and impacts of chlorinated water in natural waterways; degradation of water quality; and other factors.

 

Built upon ArcGIS and InfoWater platforms, CapPlan Water tackles the toughest data integrity and processing issues that slow typical large-scale asset management analysis projects. Leveraging the unique InfoWater geodatabase architecture, users can seamlessly work between hydraulic and water quality modeling calculations and traditional GIS data to determine probability and consequence scores without cumbersome error-prone exports and data synching to third-party applications.

 

CapPlan Water calculates the risk of each asset linearly (consequence score x probability score), using either a bi-directional distribution matrix or a more complex multi-criterion classification. This choice of calculation methods gives the utility unprecedented flexibility to define risk based on virtually any combination of supporting data. The greatest attention can then be given to water mains at highest risk. With this evaluation in hand, water utilities can create fully prioritized short- and long-term water main rehabilitation, replacement, maintenance, and management plans and develop sound, cost-effective capital programs to support them.

 

The program’s intuitive interface, easy-to-use functionality, and rich analytical, graphing, and reporting capabilities save utilities considerable resources. With minimal effort, users can quickly pinpoint assets at the greatest risk of hydraulic and water quality deficiencies or structural failure, identify the best possible improvement alternatives for optimal system performance, prioritize improvements based on available budget, and realize significant cost savings.

 

“With many of the world’s drinking water distribution systems reaching or having already exceeded their design lives, utilities need smarter ways to prioritize rehabilitation, repair, and/or replacement,” said Paul F. Boulos, Ph.D., BCEEM, Hon.D.WRE, Dist.D.NE, F.ASCE, President and COO of Innovyze “CapPlan Water is the only software package that combines GIS, hydraulic modeling, cost and budgeting data, and advanced decision support in one seamless package. We look forward to working with the City of Corpus Christi Water Department to ensure CapPlan Water meets the utility’s capital planning needs for years to come.”