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Virginia County Manages its Water and Wastewater Systems Better

GIS to the rescue.

VERONA, Va. -- The Augusta County Service Authority (ACSA) needed a more comprehensive management and decision tool for its water and wastewater utility systems.

"We were lucky to have some CADD drawings for a [water or wastewater] line," said Troy Austin, ACSA project engineer. "Everything was managed by employee memory or paper drawings. It was low reliability as to where the utilities actually were."

To continue to provide effective service for approximately 12,000 customers in this rural area, ACSA decided to implement an advanced geographic information system (GIS) to manage its water and wastewater systems.

Though the ACSA had CADD-based water modeling software, the specific information it provided limited its usefulness, and the ASCA struck a deal with GeoDecisions to develop, integrate and customize a data model and to design custom applications to meet the needs of ACSA's management.

The ACSA's existing data layers were updated and new layers were created, using a combination of GPS technology and as-builts (utility drawings). Water mains, water meters, pumps, tanks, manholes and other major point features were captured with GPS and imported into the new database created by the consulting company.

Work then shifted to integrating the new GIS database with existing non-geographic data-management tools. The ACSA currently uses a mainframe billing database and server for water-meter information.

To provide a better way of retrieving this information, a custom billing application was developed to incorporate the billing data with the meter data in the newly created database. The application allows users to obtain current and past billing information for a chosen water meter, search for meters meeting certain criteria, or to select data for calculations and analysis.

ACSA officials also wanted to be able to extract new data from the database for use in water-modeling software. ASCA officials also shared a problem facing many organizations and local governments that rely on older, established analysis software.

The consulting company created a custom tool to convert existing GIS data, and all attribute information was populated and converted to meet the county's existing software's needs. Austin expects the system to be in operation across the county within three to four years.