Sewerage Networks Active System Monitoring for Reduced Property Flooding

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‘Sewerage network failure’ caused by blockages is known as a Flooding Other Causes (FOC)as it is triggered by something other than hydraulic overload of the sewerage system in thenormal state. Property damage and clean-up can be £10k per property; in 2012 a WaterSewerage Company (WSC) which cannot be disclosed due to current negotiations withOFWAT had 17,000 escapes at a cost of £17M. OFWAT have introduced the ServiceIncentive Mechanism (SIM) which through key indictors encourages WSCs to improve theirasset and customer performance. SIM affects the prices WSCs are allowed to chargecustomers (their price limit); poor performers are penalised £10s millions and the bestrewarded with higher price limits.No current viable system exists to alarm when an FOC event occurs, except from thecustomer. This is partly because of the geographical scale of the problem and the also the costto own/operate legacy monitoring systems (£3k procure, £500/year operate). With an agingsewerage infrastructure the direction of travel for WSCs is innovation with many identifyingsewer monitoring as a key way forward. Environmental Monitoring Solutions (EMS) wishesto conduct a ‘Development of Prototype’ project to engineer a remote sensor system capableof operating in a passive mode with little maintenance and no cleaning. The proposed systemwill encompass GPRS communications techniques to transfer alarms to Artificial NeuralNetwork (ANN) based central processing modules and FOC incidence database. This systemwill allow simple threshold data to visibly show representation of the network state,prompting proactive management by the operator and reacting to potential and developingblockages before they impact on their customers. These meters do not exist, need to be lowcost; they cannot be anything other than simple. The business proposition to develop andsupply the proposed technology has been validated through discussion with five WSCs.