Water infrastructure - need for better information systems

[Peter Williams]

It seems likely that one of the areas for stimulus spending will be water infrastructure - there are some scary estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, US Army Corps of Engineers and the like about the size of the backlog in this area.

BUT it would be a mistake to make that investment without thinking about the information systems needed to manage water and run that infrastructure more effectively. Water organizations in the US are incredibly fragmented - and so is the information they have to manage with, whether about water usage, water availability, water quality, snowpack, levee status, ecosystem health or whatever. It either does not exist in the right scale, or it exists but is split between multiple stakeholders. As a consequence the decisions that must be made are made sub-optimally, within individual functional "stovepipes" or by reference only to some part of a water system when the real need is to consider the needs of the whole.

They say that 97.72% of statistics are made up on the spot, so I'll add another one. My hunch is that some large proportion, say 30-50%, of anything we spend on water infrastructure, will be wasted if we do not attend to the information systems angle - what data, what models, what tools, what visualizations, what standards, who needs to share with whom, etc etc etc. What do others think?

[Stephen Baker]

Very interesting, Peter. Do you have any idea what this infrastructure would entail? Would it mean building new info links or simply using the Internet more intelligently?

[Peter Williams]

All of the above!

Broad headings:

- data capture via sensing and integration of existing sensor networks and databases to enable data to be aggregated for entire water resources - but based on a clear view of the decisions that people will actually have to makew to manage that water resource;

- modeling and analytics (weather/climate, water quality and quantity, ground water, run-off, energy optimization, just to name a very few headings) and in particular the integration of different models;

- applications such as asset management, energy management

- advanced meter infrastructures to enable people to monitor their own consunmption more effectively;

- visualization to enable all the data and model outputs to support decisions that people have to make.

And so on. Happy to discuss more if you are interested.

Stephen Baker said:

Very interesting, Peter. Do you have any idea what this infrastructure would entail? Would it mean building new info links or simply using the Internet more intelligently?

[Stephen Baker]

Peter, I incorporated all of your points into a blog post on the BW vox stimuli blog. I asked these questions: How much will it cost, how quickly will it take to roll out, and how many jobs would this info-tech push add? I find that many of these projects, such as cyber defense, are absolutely necessary. But they may not address these primary stimulus concerns. Not a reason not to do them. But we should understand all of the pros and cons. A larger point is that all of the smart stuff takes time (because studies are required) while the dumb stuff--1950s-era road and bridge projects--get started right away. So if we don't watch it, as many have noted, we'll squander this once-in a half century opportunity building infrastructure for last century.

[Laura Wynter]

Stephen and Peter,
While Stephen is correct that the opportunity to improve the physical infrastructure using old technology should be seized, it is not the case that the smart technology should be all be left to the side because it takes time due to requiring studies. That would squander an opportunity to have not only a working infrastructure, but also a modern, efficient, and robust one.

I left a blog entry here on the transportation infrastructure. As a specialist in the area, I can attest that many of the technologies needed exist today, and while the studies Stephen mentions can make them better still, the foundation can be "built in" today. I cited some statistics on readily available modern technologies that are not widely implemented in the United States transportation infrastructure, but are available now. They do not require shovels, for the most part, but rather computer chips, algorithms, communication networks, etc. They are also in many cases implemented widely already in the other developed countries around the world. The same can be said for water technology.

[Peter Williams]

The issue is this - do you "just" want to spend for the sake putting money in the economy, or do you want to fix some wider problem at the same time (in this case, the problem statement being something like "meeting human needs for water, and balancing these with ecosystem needs, in the light of population growth and climate change")? I would assert that the wider objective is not possible without the types of investments I was talking about to make people smarter about how they understand and plan for likely water availability, likely human water needs, and how they optimize these with the needs of the planet.

I take your point about the need for action on the economy. Information technologies that are available today that would improve water management include: asset management systems, pump optimization tools, real time monitoring of water quality and many dimensions of water quantity, various forms of instrumentation for levees to enable them to warn of impending failures, information portals to enable stakeholders for a given water resource to share data, and so on. It would be a real shame if the need for speed to stimulate the economy simply led to a repetition of some of the misguided infrastructure projects of the past (think about the checkered history of dam, reservoir and water diversion projects, for example).



Stephen Baker said:

Peter, I incorporated all of your points into a blog post on the BW vox stimuli blog. I asked these questions: How much will it cost, how quickly will it take to roll out, and how many jobs would this info-tech push add? I find that many of these projects, such as cyber defense, are absolutely necessary. But they may not address these primary stimulus concerns. Not a reason not to do them. But we should understand all of the pros and cons. A larger point is that all of the smart stuff takes time (because studies are required) while the dumb stuff--1950s-era road and bridge projects--get started right away. So if we don't watch it, as many have noted, we'll squander this once-in a half century opportunity building infrastructure for last century.

[Stephen Baker]

Laura, Peter, Good points. By the way, I just found this discussion of water issues on the change.org site. There are loads of discussions there about the very same issues we're covering here.

[Stephen Baker]

Actually, I looked over the discussion of water issues, and it went all over the place, even meandering into a heated argument about illegal immigration. Here I was feeling sorry for myself that unlike Obama, we don't have hundreds of thousands of people contributing ideas. But there is a downside to all that participation: sprawl.

[RBM]

I've had a similar experience with the writing of Neal Rauhauser. He started at theoildrum.com as Sacred Cow Tipper.

From that site he started an initiative and site at strandedwind.org ( warning this is NOT a 'shovel ready' effort - but is arguably more important than any such effort - it's about food supply.)
He also writes as Stranded Wind at DailyKos.com where the sprawl of participants and meandering of arguments is apparent.