As a thriving Chicago suburb, Oak Park is famous for, amongst other things, its historic architecture including Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple (a UNESCO World Heritage). It also has one of the oldest water networks with some components dating back to the late 19th century.
Michael Bills is the Water & Sewer Superintendent for the Village of Oak Park in Chicago, US. He is responsible for maintaining its ageing 105-mile network of pipes to ensure that 1.7 billion gallons of safe, drinkable water reaches 54,000 residents annually.
Oak Park has a Lake Michigan water allocation and purchases treated water from the city of Chicago. However, the village was losing around 20% of its water through leaks each year. This works out at roughly 350 million gallons or the equivalent to 530 Olympic-sized swimming pools, enough to provide drinking water for a neighbourhood ten times the population of Oak Park.
As a result, Oak Park set itself a target of reducing water loss to 10% to meet the Illinois Department of Natural Resources regulation for Lake Michigan water users. However, the ageing water network was put under further pressure due to the regional temperature extremes which put additional stress on the pipes for them to break more easily. The local porous soil also prevented leaks from surfacing, so they were difficult to spot. Something needed to be done.
The global water crisis
Globally, more than 8.5 trillion gallons of water is lost annually due to leakage. Outdated infrastructure is one of the main reasons for this. Nearly a third of the world's lost water occurs in the US, where undetected leaks in pipes lead to the daily loss of 7 billion gallons of treated water. This costs the nation's water industry and its consumers billions of dollars annually. However, it also has a detrimental impact on people and the environment. It can mean shortages for drinking, farming, and industry as well as leading to higher costs for everyone. While less water in rivers and lakes can harm animals and plants, making it harder for them to find what they need to survive.
Listening for leaks
As one strategy to combat water loss to through leakage, Oak Park started a pilot project with HWM, a Halma company that makes environmental monitoring technologies that helps listen out for leaks on ageing networks.
Its Fluid Conservation Systems (FCS) technology uses sensors, called loggers, that were placed along a third of the Oak Park water network, attached to its pipes with magnets. These loggers pick up the smallest sounds made by water leaks. As soon as the tell-tale noise of a water leak - similar to the sound of a flute - is detected, the sensor converts it into a digital signal and alerts the system.
From there, Michael and his team can access a digital map of all possible water leaks on a network, helping them to prioritise what needs to be fixed rather than spending time sending engineers to every alert ensuring that the limited resources are deployed most effectively.
The successful pilot program helped Oak Park identify 19 leaks that had not surfaced making them otherwise undetectable. The Village of Oak Park has now implemented acoustic loggers throughout their entire water network and has found a further 10 leaks within the first month.
“Conventional leak detection methods can take up to a year, or even longer, to locate pipe failures after they would occur. The use of the permanently mounted FCS logger checks the pipe network at night when the system is quiet, allowing us to respond to a leak as soon as it is detectable. This helps to save valuable resources for the Village of Oak Park.”
Michael Bills
Water & Sewer Superintendent
Village of Oak Park
The story was originally posted to Water Online as an exclusive article on 20 August.
