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Solutions · water

The pipe that breaks on Monday was deteriorating for a decade.
Most water infrastructure risk is underground and invisible.

Water and wastewater utilities run treatment plants, pump stations, and thousands of miles of buried pipe well past design life. We help utility teams connect above-ground equipment condition to below-ground risk, and translate the infrastructure data into the consent-decree language regulators expect.

240K
Water main breaks per year in the US
$1T
Estimated investment needed for US water infrastructure over 25 years
45yr
Average age of US wastewater collection systems
850B gal
Treated water lost annually to distribution system leaks

Why water risk stays hidden until it surfaces

Water utility risk is both a technical problem and a regulatory one. The pipe that breaks is also the EPA milestone that slips. Leadership has to defend both to ratepayers and regulators at the same time.

6ft

The most critical infrastructure is buried six feet down where condition assessment is expensive and disruptive

You cannot visually inspect a 60-year-old cast iron main. Condition assessment needs excavation, CCTV, or acoustic monitoring. All of which cost money and disrupt service. Most utilities assess a fraction of their buried network annually.

SSO

Sanitary sewer overflows trigger EPA enforcement and consent-decree milestones with hard deadlines

An SSO is not just a spill. It is a compliance event. Under a consent decree, every overflow is documented, reported, and potentially fined. The pump station that caused it had been showing signs for months, but the work order sat behind 40 others.

SCADA

Treatment plant operations depend on SCADA and mechanical equipment that fail in correlated ways

When a VFD fails on a primary clarifier drive, the backup is manual operation. Which means an operator on site 24/7. When SCADA loses comms with a remote pump station during wet weather, operators are blind at the worst possible moment.

NPDES

NPDES permit limits turn every equipment failure into a potential effluent violation and public notice

A blower outage on an aeration basin, an RAS pump failure, or a UV disinfection bank going offline can push effluent BOD, TSS, or bacteria past NPDES limits within hours. Each exceedance is reportable, publicly posted, and may carry per-day penalties. Well before the root cause is fully diagnosed.

How Rivolq helps water and wastewater utilities

System dependency mapping

Map the chain from pump station to treatment plant to outfall, and see where failures propagate

We trace flow paths, electrical feeds, and SCADA chains across the collection and treatment system. When a lift station shows pump degradation, you see the upstream capacity it protects and the downstream treatment impact of a failure.

Consent decree tracking

Link spending to specific consent-decree milestones and compliance deadlines

Every project and maintenance action maps to the consent-decree requirement it addresses. Track progress against milestones and generate compliance documentation without pulling data from five systems.

Pump station intelligence

Watch pump health, wet well levels, and generator readiness across every remote station

Remote pump stations are the first line of defense against overflows. We track runtime, vibration trends, fuel levels, and backup power tests, so you see which stations are vulnerable before the next wet weather event.

Rate case defense

A PUC-ready story that links infrastructure condition directly to proposed rate adjustments

Public utility commissions and councils reject rate increases that are not backed by defensible asset data. We compile condition assessments, remaining useful life, and risk-adjusted replacement schedules into the exhibits rate analysts and commissioners expect. Spending programs get approved instead of deferred into the next SSO headline.

See your collection system risk before the next rain event.

Connect equipment condition data to consent-decree compliance and system-wide reliability.

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