A floating ball can help trace what’s entering a sewer by measuring changes in the wastewater. SewerBall tracks four indicators as it travels: temperature, conductivity, pH, and redox potential, a measure of oxidation-reduction conditions. Together, those readings help reveal changes from the sewer’s baseline water quality, explains Charles Kruse of…
Collaborative delivery isn't just for billion-dollar water infrastructure projects. It can also help utilities modernize existing facilities, upgrade technology, and make improvements within their available budgets. While alternative project delivery methods are often associated with major drinking water and wastewater treatment plants, the same approach can be scaled to smaller…
Ice crystals can scrub debris and biofilm from inside water pipes. The process starts with drinking water and food-grade table salt. As Kevin Shipp, P. Eng of SUEZ explains, that brine is chilled until ice crystals form, creating a slurry that can be pumped through hoses into drinking water lines…
Making NASA’s Earth science useful starts with understanding the decisions people need to make. Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, describes an approach that begins with users and decision-makers, rather than with a dataset the agency wants to share. The first questions concern scale: What…
The view of Earth’s water is shifting from scattered snapshots to a connected picture of the entire system. Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, says stronger computing power and sharper satellite observations are allowing scientists to examine how rainfall, groundwater, soil moisture, rivers, and reservoirs…
💧 H2O INTRO 👤 Meet Sara Hughes, Senior Policy Researcher at RAND and Professor of Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. More than 2 million Americans still live without running water or a working toilet at home. Researchers have spent years documenting where these gaps exist, what…
Replacing lead pipes one house at a time is slow and disruptive. Milwaukee is reorganizing the work neighborhood by neighborhood. Patrick Pauly, superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works, says the city developed a prioritization plan that groups replacements by census block group, allowing contractors to work more efficiently and reducing repeated…
Pipes for water systems can lose capacity or go uninspected for decades, leaving utilities with an incomplete picture of what their infrastructure can deliver. This episode looks at two technologies that SUEZ is bringing to North America by leveraging its global deployment experience. The first is ice pigging, a process…
Inside Westminster’s wastewater laboratory, chemistry reveals what the eye can’t see. Samples taken before, during, and after treatment show what’s entering the plant, how effectively the process is working, and what remains in the treated water before discharge. Tests measure suspended solids and oxygen demand—indicators of how much material remains…
What if a farmer, conservation manager, or utility operator could question decades of NASA water data in plain language—and get information tailored to a real decision? Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead for NASA, explains how the agency is working to move Earth science from vast public datasets into tools people…
Water helped create the spectacular red rock formations at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. But the story goes back hundreds of millions of years. The towering sandstone formations began as layers of sediment deposited in ancient environments, including rivers, streams, and sand dunes. Over millions of years, those…
Digging up a sewer can mean paying to rebuild the street above it. In New Orleans’ French Quarter, Manhattan, or downtown Chicago, replacing wastewater infrastructure means finding room for excavation while managing lane closures, traffic, and access to homes and businesses. Joseph Talley of Imerys explains why repairing structures in…
Hydrogen sulfide gets the blame for eating away at concrete sewers. But there’s another step in the chemistry. Joseph Talley of Imerys delivers a crash course: bacteria breaking down waste under low-oxygen conditions generate hydrogen sulfide, which can escape from wastewater into the air above it. On moist sewer surfaces…
The best water infrastructure solutions often start with listening to the people facing the problems. For water technology and equipment companies, understanding the challenges utilities, engineers, and contractors encounter can be just as valuable as developing new products. That's what Will Brannon of U.S. Pipe says he discovered through the…
What’s actually eating away at the concrete inside our sewer systems? The answer takes us into a world of bacteria, sulfuric acid, and chemical reactions happening beneath our streets. In this episode, Joseph Talley of Imerys provides a deep dive into the chemistry of wastewater corrosion. He breaks down how…
SewerAI’s testing ground for new AI tools starts inside its own office. Employees use AI for number crunching, planning, and writing, then share what they’ve built during Friday sessions every two weeks. Those experiments help identify approaches that could be useful to customers, explains Seth Nickinson , Principal Product Manager…
Every gallon leaving a wastewater treatment plant has to pass a chemistry test. I spent time with Lindie Aragon, a chemist for the City of Westminster, inside the Colorado utility’s wastewater laboratory. Lindie and her colleagues collect, preserve, and analyze samples to ensure the treated water discharged from the plant…
💧 H2O INTRO 👤 Meet Robyn Fischer, Senior Director, North America, for the International Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene Foundation (IWSH). Closing the water access gap takes skilled plumbers, quality products, and connections to the communities that need them. Fischer explains how IWSH brings plumbing industry resources and community education together…
The next leap for utility data may be less about collecting more of it—and more about being able to ask better questions. Seth Nickinson of SewerAI says utilities are increasingly consolidating information in the cloud and connecting it with GIS and other data sources. The challenge is making sense of…
Federal funding for lead pipe replacement can take months to close—long enough for a northern community to lose an entire construction season. Shawn Kerachsky, president and CEO of Community Infrastructure Partners, says interim financing can keep that delay from stopping the work. In Wausau, Wisconsin, the company provided upfront funding…
Even in the middle of New York City, there’s something special about finding space to slow down and enjoy the water. I spent some time walking along the East River beneath the Queensboro Bridge (better known as the 59th Street Bridge), taking in the views of Roosevelt Island, the passing…
In Greeley, a water leak that once could go unnoticed for weeks can now show up in the data within minutes. John Goyen, a civil engineer with Greeley Water and Sewer who managed the city’s meter replacement project, explains the difference between the old system and Advanced Metering Infrastructure, or…
After years of collecting and organizing data, the water sector appears to be reaching a turning point: AI is helping utilities put that information to work proactively. In this episode, Seth Nickinson, Director of Product at SewerAI, brings the perspective of a software developer responding to what utilities need from…
Fecal contamination can reach swimmers and drinking water supplies before laboratory results reveal the problem. Virridy is using optical sensors to help close that reporting gap. Evan Thomas, CEO of Virridy, explains how its Lume sensor uses tryptophan-like fluorescence—a light signal associated with organic material—and machine learning to estimate E.…