EXTON, PA, Nov. 3, 2009 – The city of Phoenix, AZ, has acquired Bentley’s SewerGEMS multiplatform software for sanitary sewer systems to enhance its ability to analyze, design, and operate its extensive wastewater infrastructure.
The city's infrastructure serves approximately 1.5 million residents and includes about 5,000 miles of sewer mains and 92,000 sewer manholes. The city's Water Services Department engineers will use the software to create a wastewater model that will help with master planning, rehabilitation sequencing, development capacity allocation, and sanitary sewer overflow warnings, while improving the efficiency of daily operations.
Over the last few years, the Phoenix water department’s wastewater planning efforts have been moving away from a “predict and plan” approach to the more proactive practice of “anticipate and prepare.” The problem is, predictions of future growth areas and likely growth rates, changing weather patterns, water appliance efficiencies, and customer behavior are highly unreliable, offering little insight into conditions for which the water department must prepare.
Erich Lais, P.E., city of Phoenix civil engineer III, said, “By developing and analyzing our wastewater model with SewerGEMS’ built-in hydraulic and hydrology tools, wet-weather calibration methods, Scenario Control Center, and many other capabilities, we will be able to explore a broad range of possible future factors and develop a plan to prepare for each. As a result, we will be better able to adapt to changing conditions and consequent wastewater system requirements, enabling us to continue to meet our customers’ needs.”
The city of Phoenix acquired SewerGEMS to complement the WaterGEMS license it acquired in 2007 to model and analyze its water distribution system. Because sewer modeling software includes the same model management tools and has a user interface very similar to that of WaterGEMS, it will be very easy for the city’s project teams to use this new software.
From urban sewer planning to overflow remediation analysis to optimized best management practices designs, SewerGEMS provides an easy-to-use environment for engineers to analyze, design, and operate sanitary and combined sewer systems. Users of SewerGEMS can work across four interoperable platforms, including MicroStation, ArcGIS, AutoCAD, and a Windows stand-alone platform, while accessing a single, shared project data source. This means modeling teams can leverage the skills of engineers from different departments, and engineers can flatten learning curves by choosing the environment they already know – while providing results that can be visualized on multiple platforms. For additional information about SewerGEMS, visit www.bentley.com/en-US/Products/SewerGEMS.
