Water is our most precious resource. Whether at home, at the office, or out in the community, our access to potable drinking water is often taken for granted-its power only realized when we are forced to go without.
Providing this essential resource is, for most people, an unseen endeavor. For those charged with maintaining these critical assets, it is a challenge that grows more and more difficult every day. Around the globe, water providers are finding themselves at the intersection of steadily growing demand and an aging infrastructure that is becoming less and less efficient, or in some cases unable to support the existing population. In the United States, according to ASCE, leaking pipes lose an estimated 7 billion gallons of clean drinking water a day. The main issue preventing governments from addressing these issues is the lack of capital required to tackle such a large and widespread problem.
Left unaddressed, these assets continue to deteriorate, resulting in a loss of revenue, soaring maintenance costs, water outages and in some cases, catastrophic failure. These problems cause the existing gap between capital budgets and need to expand exponentially. A 2002 EPA study suggests that over the next 20 years, this gap may reach into the hundreds of billions.
The need for new, innovative and efficient methods to accurately detect, assess, maintain and repair this infrastructure is essential to each and every community around the world.