Everything's bigger in Texas, including water challenges

This time around, we've got a grab-bag of interesting water innovations (or potential innovations) with a particular focus on Texas, which faces significant water challenges. We also have a brand-new story about one of our Texas customers, Trinity River Authority. They're squeezing as much usefulness out of their hydraulic models as possible.

Wounded? Just add water.

Did you know that electrical stimulation can speed the healing of chronic wounds? A new type of electric bandage can be activated by just adding water: Water-powered "electric bandage" sticks it to slow-healing wounds.

Pairing desalinization with green energy

The Wall Street Journal has a headline that doesn't fully deliver, instead tempting you with a bit of clickbait: How a Moroccan Fishing Town Could Hold the Key to Water Stress in a Warming World. The story is actually about water desalinization, which is a slowly growing trend, but it's growing slowly because it take a lot of energy to pull all of that salt out of the water. But here's the key thing to know: Demand is expected to ramp as the cost of renewable power drops. As they say in the article:

“Desalination and renewable power is a marriage made in heaven because both partners offer what the other one needs."

This idea of pairing water projects with sustainable energy (eg, solar + water) is a powerful one so keep looking out for stories like this. Combining water-related projects with clean energy makes both better. Could your water utility possibly do something in that vein going forward? Even on a small scale, as an experiment? Ask around. Bring it up. Find out.

Swimming in cities is... wild?

The Olympics in Paris have kicked off a "wild swimming" boom. The NY Times has 6 European Cities Where You Can Swim in the Wild. But Bloomberg wins the urban swim beat with A Guide to Urban Swimming in Europe, Beyond the Seine.

Totally Ludacris

Good news. He's fine: Ludacris sparks alarm by drinking unfiltered Alaska glacier water.

“I’m a water snob. It was the best-tasting water I’ve ever had in my life.”

Let's just hope nobody (including Ludacris) gets the bright idea of melting the remaining glaciers and selling that water in plastic bottles. That would be worse than ludicrous.

The de-plastification of water

Removing microplastics like PFAs from water is one of the big challenges for researchers around the world right now, and you will continue to see new proposals for devices like The Plastic Hunter, which is designed to mimic the kind of underwater plants that naturally capture debris under water. Here, the idea is to attract plastic. One way to use this is to place arrays of these silicone brush root filters, which are highly hydrophobic so microplastic particles stick to them, in areas of critical contamination like polluted wastewater effluent streams to capture microplastic particles.

Water professionals are still trying to get their heads around the scope of PFAs, but it seems likely that water treatment plants will be the key location where remediaton against PFAs will be focused. At the rate stories are being published that show just how prevalent microplastics are, you can be almost certain that your local water utility will need to begin fielding more and more questions from customers who read stories like There’s a “Pretty Alarming” Amount of Microplastics in Our Brains from Popular Mechanics. How much, on average? Maybe as much as in a plastic spoon.

All the water in the world

Did you know that the oceans account for only a thin film of water on the surface? Believe it or not, this is All of Earth's water in a single sphere.

Aquafade: water-soluble electronics

This is an intriguing idea: Build electronic components with housing parts that can biodegrade, making recovery of the valuable metals easier: Aquafade water-soluble electronics provide way to tackle e-waste. They claim their water soluble plastic-like material is biocompatible, which is a bit of a tricky word without a clear and specific meaning. The material is polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), something you might see in your own home if you use dishwashing soap pods. In fact, those pods inspired these students to pursue the idea.

But does this material just become a form of liquid plastic? Nobody really knows yet, which underscores the need for water professionals to dig into the plastic problem and be as informed as possible. They say the material will naturally biodegrade in a sewage system, but we also know that most water treatment plants don’t break down or capture PVA, which means it might just end up in the world's water supply. We have to keep encouraging efforts like this, but we also need to examine the details, which isn't always easy when we're talking about early research and prototypes, or when businesses outpace regulations.

Produced water coming back to haunt Texas

An SMU study is the first scientific proof to draw specific links between wastewater injection and recent blowouts in the Permian Basin, the nation’s top producing oil field, where old Texas oil wells have lately begun to spray salty water: Ranchers reported abandoned oil wells spewing wastewater. A new study blames fracking. West Texas farmers, who depend almost entirely on groundwater for drinking and crop irrigation, are getting very worried:

“If I could do one thing differently, we would have gotten a mobile home so it was easier to get the hell out of here. If this ranch goes leaking, we just have to leave and nobody will buy the property, no insurance will cover it, you’re just done.”

Texas is the new Arizona

Bloomberg has a nice article that digs into groundwater issues: Texas Is the New Arizona, and Not in a Good Way points out that some counties in Texas are growing just as fast as in Arizona. This is problematic when you consider that Arizona, the typical poster child for unrestrained growth, recently broke another new record, with Phoenix (America's fifth largest city) hitting 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 100 days straight.

For some reason, Americans appear to be moving towards the places where climate change will be most disruptive – and where fresh water is quickly becoming scarce.

The Bloomberg article quotes Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, who is a very important and respected voice in water matters:

“We have always built where we wanted to build, let people move where they want to move, and hoped we would find the resources to satisfy their demands. We’re now running up against a difficult reality: the realization there isn’t necessarily enough water to meet whatever demands we might have in the future.”

Houston, we have a funding problem

How would you like to be the person who has to deliver the message to lawmakers that not only does Houston need $9.1B to resolve a consent decree with the EPA, they need another $4.93B to replace pipes, which will most certainly require another significant rate hike? Houston lost 36 billion gallons of water from leaky pipes since 2023. That's enough to supply an entire city. Did they try to push that number below $5B because it sounds better – like a $4.99 special at Wal-mart? If so, who could blame them?

(May we humbly suggest using InfoWater Pro's Surge Analysis feature to find pipes that need replacing, like Davidson Water does. They reduced leaks by 36% over 10 years.)

On the One Water Blog...

Will the Texas population keep growing at this rapid pace? Will climate change drop more unexpected 100-year storms on what has long been called Flash Flood Alley? All signs point to increases in nearly every challenging metric that watershed managers like the Trinity River Authority will need to stay on top of to meet the challenges of the future.

But TRA has expert modelers on staff, access to the best digital twin technologies, and a reputation as innovators. They're ready. Our ace reporter Trevor English writes about them in our latest customer story: Trinity River Authority: Streamlining water treatment plant operations with an InfoWorks ICM digital twin.

InfoDrainage collapses tiers

Should you be using InfoDrainage Standard or Ultimate? We just made it easier to decide by collapsing the two tiers into one product: InfoDrainage. This change means that now all users will have access to our highly-regarded Civil 3D integration, clash detection functionality, and 2D exceedance analysis tools.

Any questions? Trevor English has all the answers about this positive news in InfoDrainage simplifies offering, streamlines hydraulic modeling offering for site drainage design.

If you're interested in hearing even more, check out our webinar which happened yesterday, Game Changer: Introducing the new InfoDrainage offering. The webinar isn't up yet, but sign up and we'll send you a link to the recording when it's published.

InfoDrainage around the world

Trevor (does this guy ever sleep?) also wrote an article for curious Canucks who want to use InfoDrainage in their work, which also includes a nice SuDS/LIDs infographic: Harnessing the power of InfoDrainage in Canada: regional and customizable settings. No matter what the regulations of the province, you can customise the software if you need to. He also wrote about All of the free drainage design learning content available for InfoDrainage. Make this guy take a vacation already!

Our InfoDrainage software (free trial and free for education) has always been popular in the UK, but we're seeing more and more interest worldwide. Sometimes, this is because water professionals everywhere see the round-tripping connection between Civil 3D and InfoDrainage and see how valuable this could be in their work. When they can collaborate better with other designers and share the same data, they see that their voice will be more important in the overall project and that they may be able to inform and influence projects earlier in the project lifecycle. It's all about better collaboration.

A good example of that is when it comes to building highways that need drainage design. We already have perhaps the most advance interest for a webinar ever with our upcoming Integrated highway drainage design using InfoDrainage and Civil 3D on September 26. We're seeing a huge amount of interest from Indian audiences on LinkedIn. Can't make it in your time zone? Sign up and we'll send you a link to the recording afterward.

HEC-RAS, HEC-HMS & InfoWorks ICM

We've written a lot about hydraulic modeling recently, tackling questions we hear from customers and potential customers. For example, we hear a lot about HEC-RAS (and HEC-HMS) because some of our customers need to use HEC-RAS to gain approval in some situations, even if they might prefer to use InfoWorks ICM.

Both HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS have their advantages in different situations, and it’s clear that a number of our customers sometimes also run parallel models in HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS. So, how do you know which one to choose, what the differences are, and when to use both? Youssef Al Faham and Trevor English break it all down in 1D and 2D modeling with InfoWorks ICM and HEC-RAS: Differences, similarities, and an integrated workflow.

SS, EPS, or both?

InfoWorks ICM customers utilize both Steady State (SS) and Extended Period Simulations (EPS) runs in their work. We polled them in a recent webinar "Understanding holistic wastewater modeling using InfoWorks ICM" and found that the choice our customers make depends on different factors.

Fortunately, in InfoWorks ICM, there are ways for you to tackle modeling either approaches, and Youssef, Trevor and Ryan Brown show you how in Deciding between steady state and extended period simulations in InfoWorks ICM. The post also has the webinar embedded if you want to go deeper.

Water Drop workflow videos

We make a lot of 'Water Drop' workflow videos, which show our customers how to do one thing very well. Most of them are created by our North American team, but this time around, we welcome new ideas from Aussies Tran Nguyen (first time poster!) and Matt Piggot:

• Ryan Brown: Total, live, and dead storage in InfoWorks ICM
• Tran Nguyen: The Area Take Off method (ATO) in InfoWorks ICM
• Tim Medearis: The basics of variable speed pumps in InfoWater Pro
• Matthew Piggott: Hydrologic applications with InfraWorks and InfoWorks ICM

We drop a new batch on the One Water Blog every month, but you can also subscribe to the Water Drop Workflows playlist on YouTube for videos as we drop them.

How to do CCTV right

We're wrapping up a customer story about CCTV, and from doing the research, it's clear that too many water utilities struggle with implementing CCTV programs, either because they can't keep up with all of the footage they collect, can't organize it well, or don't really dig into the data they collect to identify trends. The unfortunate reality is that many utilities are unable to view their CCTV inspections on a map. Thus, they struggle to get a holistic view.

Patrick Bonk and Martha Nunez said to themselves: This cannot stand. We will write a comprehensive guide for water professionals who want to do CCTV right. Read How Info360 Asset is solving the common challenges of CCTV.

The best price of all

Finally... a reminder that our desktop software is free for educators and students. Help us continue to spread the word.

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