Photo: Galveston.com

Innovation, connectivity, and information empower an island tourist community

12 June 2024

For Galveston and Badger Meter, modernising into a city of the future started with data-powered, cellular-enabled water management.

The Texas city of Galveston is surrounded by water – but that doesn’t make managing this precious resource any easier.

Its location on a barrier island makes it particularly vulnerable to extreme weather. In fact, the 1900 hurricane that took thousands of lives is considered one of the worst natural disasters in US history. Recovery involved building new structures several feet off the ground. While this elevation protects residents from floods, it also leaves plumbing vulnerable to future storms.

Compounding the challenge even more, the city “grew in pieces” over the years, explained Trino Pedraza, executive director of public works and utilities. “Many builders and developers only build for what’s needed at the moment,” Pedraza said. “So, water and sewers are really tricky—we have a lot of pipe sizes, and connection points aren’t what they need to be.”

Pedraza and his staff didn’t have full visibility into leaks and other issues across the city’s utility footprint. And managing such a piecemeal water system becomes an even greater problem when the community needs to support over 50,000 permanent residents and a fluctuating population of tourists throughout the calendar year. Thanks to its history, parks, coastal cuisine, and miles of beaches, Galveston welcomed over 8 million visitors in 2022 –a steady increase over years prior.

“The population can surge from 50,000 to 500,000 on a weekend,” said Joe DeVito, senior manager of utility solutions with Badger Meter and a former city official himself. “It’s a very taxing situation on a water utility.”

While the city had long aspired to digitise its water operations and modernise infrastructure, it was 2021 winter storm Uri that moved these plans into high gear.

“There was snow on the beach. We’re not built for the winter,” Pedraza said. “Our electricity was cut off for nearly three days, and we had significant issues with leaks and getting people water. It was time to figure out our resiliency models once and for all. We realised we needed a smart water approach with the future in mind.”

Cellular networks and a “full Cadillac” solution

Badger Meter’s solutions were introduced with the deployment of enhanced metering technology communicated through cellular advanced metering infrastructure (AMI). “The meters had been in the ground for more than 20 years,” DeVito said.

The new equipment includes Badger Meter E-Series® Ultrasonic meters with an integrated flow restriction valve, larger E-Series® Ultrasonic meters equipped with pressure and temperature sensors, and cellular AMI endpoints that securely communicate metering data. It all feeds into the BEACON® Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for a holistic view of the network, and most importantly, the end customers can access their water consumption information via smartphone app.

“This allows the city to better manage water supplies during an extreme weather event,” said Jose Pulido, Badger Meter Smart Water Solution Architect.

Galveston’s Pedraza called it “the full Cadillac package with all capabilities.”

Connecting it all

“If the network can send a video of a family on the beach, it can easily send data about a meter,” Pedraza noted. “And what did we have to install? Nothing.” The existing cellular networks in Galveston had the connectivity this deployment needed, avoiding the need to install a new AMI communication network.

The cellular-enabled solution offered many advantages for resiliency as well since Badger Meter’s cellular solution kept equipment “in a box low to the ground,” offering the equipment more protection from heavy winds that sometimes whip over the island.

Pedraza praised Badger Meter’s approach to connectivity and to bringing all the monitoring and control instruments together into one platform.

“Not only did Badger Meter provide a simple approach, the meters and platform had so many connection points to other technologies that are ready enough to go, like supplemental devices on hydrants and water taps that give different granular levels of pressure monitoring,” DeVito said.

“It’s a second or third eye on everything we have and different ways of getting information,” Pedraza added. “That speaks to resiliency right there.”

Badger Meter’s advice for other cities embarking on a similar journey?

“You never want to overload,” said DeVito. “Stage your improvements strategically and be ready to deal with change management. You don’t know what you don’t know.”

“Just like water is dynamic by nature, inherently your project will be dynamic and evolving,” said Pulido.

 

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Photo source: Galveston.com GALVESTON.COM: Living & Working – Galveston, TX