Much of the underground drainage infrastructure is not highway authority owned, a sizeable percentage being owned by the water authority. When highway crews attended to jet blockages, time was wasted if they could not differentiate between blocked gullies and the mainline sewer system.Understanding who owns what (highway drainage vs mainline sewer) was critical information for gully crews.With the highway authority being the first port of call for surface water flooding, time could be wasted by crews attending flooding hot spots, which could only be resolved by the water authority.
KaarbonTech incorporated the visibility of local water authority drainage networks into their drainage management software. Gully crews could instantly see, in an interactive map-based interface on their PDAs, where water authority assets lie, on their network. The visibility of this useful data allowed the crews in the field, to understand more quickly, what was causing the problem, and whose responsibility it was to resolve it. Any data referred to the water authority is in GIS format, which can be instantly viewed on their systems.
With no more time wasted on jetting false blockages, councils taking advantage of this feature in Gully SMART have been able to reduce jetting time by an average of four minutes per gully. Given most councils have a policy of jetting all non-operational gullies, this equates to an average of 10% of gullies cleaned – saving £86,666. The time saving for the crew, and avoidance of further rectification by the council are considerable but unquantifiable. However, on average, 1% of assets are affected by a water authority requirement to cleanse downstream
