Kansas City Water Turns Fire Hydrants Into Leak Finders

Kansas City Water has been around for over a century. And as needs evolve and original infrastructure ages, the municipality’s public utility is renewing its network and slowly incorporating smart technology to improve their management of drinking water, wastewater and stormwater. They began their smart journey in 2010 with the Smart Sewer Project after a consent decree with the country’s EPA, mandated Kansas City to curb wastewater overflows into the environment. To reduce pollution, the utility started deploying new infrastructure and some smart devices, like the hundreds of flow and level sensors in their wastewater system.
More recently, in the summer of 2022, KC Water decided to focus some smart efforts on main pipe leakage and started deploying Orbis Smartcaps on some of the city fire hydrants.

In this video, we interview Nicholas Wolf, Utility Superintendent for Leakage Investigations at KC Water, to discuss how the utility relies on Smartcaps on their fire hydrants to gather acoustic data and find leaks in their main pipes.