HRSD Centralizes Collection System Data
Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD), a utility located in the Commonwealth of Virginia, has introduced a regional hydraulic wastewater model that centralizes pipeline and pump station data from its system and the systems of the 14 localities it serves by implementing an online data validation and loading service powered by Safe Software's spatial ETL platform, FME® Server.
This action will help prepare the district for the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality's (DEQ) sanitary sewer overflow reduction requirements.
The regional model will help HRSD identify areas of the collection system that can be improved to reduce the inflow and infiltration (I/I) overflows for the Chesapeake Bay watershed. To effectively integrate this data, HRSD needed to ensure that the incoming data's model was correctly standardized, and that the data met specified criteria. HRSD also wanted to prevent the need for manual data clean-up and integration tasks. .
The district's selection is a scalable, Web-based platform that provides flexible spatial data distribution and loading services.
In starting its data centralization project, HRSD first determined which validation tests would be required. They then used FME to create a spatial data workflow for the geometric and attribute quality checks they needed to perform on the jurisdictions' pipeline data. They published this workflow to FME Server, making it available online for the data contributors. Using a Web form, these contributors can upload their data and have it automatically run through the validation process. If corrections are required, a concise report identifies areas that need to be fixed before the data can be loaded. If the data passes validation, it is loaded into HRSD's centralized ESRI® ArcSDE™ database.
"We now have a system that can quickly get the jurisdictions' data into our hands, without having to worry about whether the jurisdiction is meeting the basic requirements," said Clay Wise, senior programmer analyst for HRSD, said on Feb. 24. "In the past, HRSD has had to pour a lot of resources into data centralization projects, including staff time spent manually cleaning up data coming in many different formats. By implementing FME Server, we can now complete a task in just a few minutes that other teams have taken over a week to accomplish."