The Huntington Water Quality Board (HWQB), providing sanitary sewer service to 70,000 residents in Huntington (WV) and several surrounding communities, operates the largest collection system & wastewater treatment plant in West Virginia. For nearly 90 years, the utility has safeguarded its community’s health and safety, serving as a vital pillar of the public good.

Huntington, like many other communities in the region, has experienced decades of population decline and difficult economic conditions. This has exacerbated the challenge to maintain a combined sewer system and treatment plant, leading to broken mains, failing pump stations, and a plant stretched beyond capacity and life expectancy. Streets flooded regularly during rain events, and residents found sewage backing up into their basements and front yards. As these issues compounded, pressure from the community and state regulatory agencies began to mount.

“We’re in the process of upgrading our wastewater treatment plant at an estimated cost of $225 MM, but this accounts for just one-third of the total value of our system, with collection making up the other two-thirds. We knew that we needed to improve how decisions were made in this part of our organization.” -Brian Bracey

Although HWQB was already working with established GIS, work order management, and SCADA vendors, they sought a tool that could integrate all these systems into one holistic platform. This would allow them to leverage insights to prioritize the significant backlog of investment needed, with a focus on immediate results. After thoroughly evaluating the market, HWQB chose to enhance their digital efforts and partnered with APX10 to deliver its decision intelligence platform for their sanitary sewer assets.

“We evaluated similar platforms but found that they are asking us to do a lot of the heavy lifting that APX is doing already. This allowed us to start making decisions about our system in weeks rather than spending months or years to set everything up ourselves.” -Brian Bracey

As an initial step, HWQB is also using the APX® platform to prioritize their data cleansing, providing them with a better understanding of where assets are located and what they are made of. A critical step in their asset management journey, the utility is fast-tracking this process using the automated data quality assessment. Already in the process, the picture of network criticality has become significantly more clear, allowing them to leverage platform insights to prioritize operational work and capital projects. Most importantly, they can do so knowing these decisions are made using a data foundation that is objective, accurate and reliable.

[The APX platform] has changed the way we think about our data and the need to have a better understanding of network assets.” -Brian Bracey

With the treatment plant expansion and investments in their collection system, HWQB is entering a new era based on sound, proactive decision-making. With the APX solution, they are positioning themselves to continue to provide safe, reliable sewer services to the community for generations to come.