Hospital water crisis

There’s a water crisis in Bangladesh and it’s affecting healthcare.

The National Institute of Cardiovascular Disease, a specialised public hospital, only has one pump and it’s been out of action for days with no realistic prospect of that changing any time soon.  1,100 patients are affected and water is having to be tankered to the hospital at additional cost.

Which begs a question: how do you allocate capital expenditure most effectively?

You need to understand the following:

  • Propensity to fail
  • Stress
  • Strategic importance
  • Cost to renovate/replace

In an ideal world, you’d know the exact condition of every piece of pipe in the network.  But it’s just too costly to survey the entire network to determine this.  So, the best way to do it is:

  • Infer condition using an algorithm that combines available information like burst history, age, material, soil type, etc.
  • Identify the actual stress placed on the pipe in terms of absolute pressure level and variability in pressure (including transients)
  • Overlay your assessment of the relative importance of each area served by the pipe (with a specialised public hospital likely falling into the top tier)
  • Validate sections prioritised for renovation/replacement with a cost-effective condition monitoring solution

In other words: use PipeRank, i2O loggers, and ePulse.  All from Mueller Water Products.