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- Category: Summer 2020
By Doug Riseden, HYMAX
Technical Support Manager
for Mueller Water Products
Water main breaks have an uncanny way of always happening at night, on weekends, and during the holidays – or it seems that way, anyway. While it would be great to have a glass ball to predict when these breaks happen, the reality is that emergency pipe repairs are a fact of life for utilities. How can we minimize their occurrences and make them less severe and shorten water off times that lead to closed businesses, frustrated customers, and other negative consequences? A sound approach is to look backward as we move forward – gathering information and data to help forecast when repairs and replacements are needed – and converting these emergencies into scheduled repairs.
- Details
- Category: Summer 2020
When you think of tracking the prevalence and spread of the novel coronavirus disease, COVID-19, you imagine labs testing individual nasal swabs, but an unlikely star is emerging as a powerful tool to track the spread of this new disease: wastewater. Researchers can analyze a community’s wastewater to detect viral particles excreted by individuals infected with COVID-19. Data suggests that an infected person will excrete into wastewater millions, if not billions of viral genomes each day. These viral particles can then survive two to four days as they travel through the wastewater system.