Anglian Water has become the first utility to adopt new cloud-based technology to detect rising main sewer bursts. In a world-first, the UK utility is implementing early-warning system BurstDetect, as part of its drive to eliminate serious pollution events in its region by 2025.
Through a dashboard, BurstDetect provides an overview of system status together with current and historical burst alerts. If data suggests a potential burst, an alert is sent to control rooms for early response. Such early action can prevent the escape of sewage and resulting environmental damage, ensuring companies fulfil their environmental obligations and avoid fines, regulatory penalties and prosecutions, and long-term reputational damage.
By being the first utility to invest in BurstDetect, Anglian Water is leading the way, proving its commitment to cutting pollutions by embracing innovation.
The technology for BurstDetect is developed in collaboration with UK water companies, in direct response to the sector’s challenge to cut pollutions in a sustainable and cost-effective way.
Rising main sewers pose a unique challenge to water companies. The pumped wastewater they convey can have a catastrophic ecological impact in the event of a burst, causing major disruption to customers, resulting in expensive tankering and clean-up operations and serious reputational damage - such events are just not acceptable in the eyes of customers and regulators.
BurstDetect uses unique algorithms to detect bursts using existing data from wastewater pumping stations. The technology can be applied to nearly all pumping stations – even those with just basic pump status monitoring – and requires no additional hardware, with the aim of achieving 100% coverage in networks being monitored.
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The system accepts data at a range of monitoring frequencies with algorithms being applied to understand and characterise ‘normal’ pumping station behaviour. This training and testing approach to machine learning is becoming increasingly important to water companies, giving them more actionable insight than ever before, utilising data that may not have been fully harnessed otherwise.