Avoiding Water Main Breaks

Muthu Chandrasekaran, Vice President, Business Development for Pure Technologies, explains how Pure Technologies is helping utilities understand their underground assets in more detail to avoid major line interruptions.

The following is an excerpt from a Q&A with Water Online Radio. Click on the Radio Player above to hear the full interview.

Water Online Radio: What are the impacts of water main breaks?

Muthu: One of the biggest impacts is public confidence in our utilities. Water main breaks can undermine the level of confidence the consumer has in their utility. Utilities are doing amazing things with limited budgets but water main breaks can affect the consumer’s confidence factor –they start to question what their utilities do. But it's not the utility's fault.

Obviously, the big impact is that the road comes up and dollars have to be spent to fix it. Who's paying for that? Well, the taxpayer is paying for that. There are many costs that could be avoided.

Water Online Radio: If the utility is the owner of the water main and it breaks, how come it’s not their fault? Certainly, it’s their responsibility, right?

Muthu: A lot of individuals are inheriting these systems. It's not a question of fault. It's what can we do to get better. That's really the question. It's our infrastructure. We all pay taxes, correct? We all have to take a level of ownership, and ask ourselves what we can do to help maintain it.

Water Online Radio: If a pipe has exceeded its expected lifespan, why don't we just replace it?

Muthu: The costs associated with that are enormous. I think the last ACE report card reported that a million miles of pipe in the US alone is past its expected lifespan. It would cost over two trillion dollars to replace all that. Where would we find the funds to do that?

Water Online Radio: What is Pure Technologies doing to help address this?

Muthu: When we started, we were focusing on concrete pressure pipe…

Click on the Radio Player above to hear the full interview.