Assets are the life blood of your utility. These are the pipes, pumps, manholes, hydrants, etc. that enable us to provide water services to you. Without proper attention, your utility will not function properly and has the potential to create an undesirable public health situation.
I’m talking about what we call ‘asset management’ and it means understanding the what and where of your water, reclaimed water, and wastewater networks. For Loudoun Water, asset management begins with the GIS (geographic information system). Please learn more about GIS from our software vendor, ESRI, but what I tell my mom is that it’s a computer map. When your utility is extended, it is absolutely critical that we know where this has occurred. The GIS is our means for accomplishing this and provides Loudoun Water with a single, seamless view of all your assets. If someone in the company asks a question with the word where in it, the answer is in the GIS.
We use GIS to support all aspects of our business and the GIS team performs updates on a daily basis. Our utility protection team (the folks who respond with blue, purple and green paint when you call Miss Utility) are the ‘mission critical’ 24/7/365 GIS users, so we’ve got them set up with a portable view into the GIS that they can take on the road with them. Our engineering team uses GIS to see where assets currently exist and so that they can effectively support our development community partners as they extend your utility. Maintenance staff rely on GIS details like where is the nearest valve to the pipe break so that they can quickly affect a repair while impacting the fewest number of customers. Our planners and senior staff need to see a high-level view of major assets that is uncluttered by the hundreds of miles of small-diameter piping you own. These are just a few examples.
One way we make our GIS data useful and usable is by showing your assets overlaid on what we call ‘base map’ data. Base map data includes streets, buildings, property boundaries and aerial photography. We are extremely fortunate to have an excellent relationship with the Loudoun County Office of Mapping who share their very detailed and highly-accurate data with us free of charge.
Your assets are considered ‘sensitive’ (we don’t want the bad guys to mess with your drinking water) and one way we protect them is by keeping GIS data secure. If you’d like to see what the GIS looks like, you are welcome to come to our office; we’d love to show it to you. If you’re interested, we can zoom the map to your home and explore how water flows to and from there. Bring the kids and we’ll find the nearest water valve, fire hydrant and sewer manhole so that on the drive home, you can talk about the pipes buried beneath the road and imagine how they are connected to the things above ground that you can see.
Submitted and Written By Senior GIS Analyst Craig Lees