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Protecting Philadelphia’s drinking water means looking far beyond the city limits. With 98% of the Schuylkill River watershed outside Philadelphia, keeping pollution away from drinking-water intakes depends on understanding what happens upstream—and working with the communities there.

Day In The Life is a series showing how utility workers keep America’s water systems running. This episode follows Kelly Anderson, director of the office of watersheds at the Philadelphia Water Department, whose responsibility is also personal: her family drinks the water she helps protect.

Anderson grew up exploring creeks and watching the Delaware River from her New Jersey hometown. A hands-on science education at Drexel University and utility internships starting in 2002 turned that curiosity into a career, with early assignments ranging from walking Philadelphia’s creeks to investigating conditions near the watershed’s headwaters.

At the Manayunk Canal and Flat Rock Dam, she examines how restored flow could improve water quality near a drinking-water intake. A visit to Wissahickon Creek recalls a cyanide spill that helped shape her understanding of emergency response and the consequences of pollution upstream.

Source-water protection connects scientific investigation, long-term planning, and relationships with people across a watershed. For utilities, that work means anticipating threats before water reaches a treatment plant, while staying ready for the spill or storm that changes the day’s priorities.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability. The Day In The Life series is made possible by sponsors:

Platinum sponsor Pentair

Gold sponsors Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies, National Association of Clean Water Agencies, and Water Environment Federation.

Silver sponsors American Water Works Association, Association of State Drinking Water Administrators, Human Capital Solutions, and Vaughan Company.

Getting water from underground aquifers or waterways into a treatment plant means responding to changing conditions, protecting equipment, and caring for the environment at the source. The systems that collect and filter that water have to adapt to achieve those goals.

In this episode, John Wilson, CEO of Johnson Screens, brings a perspective from infrastructure most people never see. He traces the decisions that begin underground or on the surface and continue through water collection, treatment, and the effort to keep equipment working for decades.

Drilling deeper introduces engineering challenges beyond simply reaching water, including greater loads and pressure on well components. Wilson also describes how lower river levels can leave existing intakes poorly positioned, while protecting fish, mussels, and other aquatic life adds another layer to their design.

Those pressures make getting more from existing infrastructure especially relevant. From rehabilitating wells affected by scale buildup to using recycled glass as filtration media, Wilson discusses approaches intended to extend service life, reduce fouling, and put discarded materials to work.

Choosing among those options starts with understanding the particular site and questioning whether yesterday’s approach still fits. The conversation closes with another practical challenge: bringing students into facilities and giving them hands-on exposure before the industry’s experienced workforce moves on.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.

Routine pump maintenance can interrupt chemical feed and consume time that water treatment operators already have too little of. Designing around that reality means looking beyond pumping performance to how equipment is cleaned, repaired, and adapted when conditions change.

In this episode from WEFTEC 2026, Rob Gledhill, president and CEO of Blue-White Industries, explains how watching operators work helped turn a pump update into a broader redesign. What began as improvements to a peristaltic metering pump became a platform designed to accommodate different pumping technologies.

The idea becomes tangible when Gledhill swaps a peristaltic pump head for a diaphragm head in about ten seconds. He explains how the software recognizes the change, and why rising system pressure might prompt an operator to switch technologies rather than replace the entire pump.

That flexibility also changes the maintenance routine: a prepared spare head can go into service while the worn one moves to a workbench. Smaller engineering decisions matter, too, including check valves designed to fit only in the correct orientation, addressing an assembly mistake Gledhill has seen in plants.

Throughout the conversation, the focus returns to the operator’s experience and the tradeoffs between accuracy, pressure, tube life, and ease of maintenance. The practical goal is to give operators more control over when and where they do the work, while reducing the time equipment spends out of service.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.

Pipes for water systems can lose capacity or go uninspected for decades, leaving utilities with an incomplete picture of what their infrastructure can deliver.

This episode looks at two technologies that SUEZ is bringing to North America by leveraging its global deployment experience. The first is ice pigging, a process that cleans pressurized pipes. The second is a floating device called SewerBall that gathers images and water-quality data.

Kevin Shipp, SUEZ’s general manager for ice pigging in North America, explains how a slurry of ice crystals removes accumulated debris and biofilm. He describes a North Carolina project where lift station flow increased from 120 to 490 gallons per minute, restoring capacity needed for a new subdivision.

Finding out what is happening inside a sewer presents a different challenge, especially where inspection trucks cannot reach. Charles Kruse, SUEZ’s North American SewerBall leader, shares how a floating device combines cameras with water-quality sensors to inspect previously inaccessible pipes.

There’s some fascinating chemistry in that detective work, too. Changes in pH, conductivity, and other measurements can offer clues about groundwater entering a sewer or an industrial discharge, helping utilities identify where closer attention is needed.

Abigail Antolovich, SUEZ’s vice president of sales and business development for Tech Solutions, connects these approaches to decisions about maintenance, repairs, and capital spending. She describes how operating experience, careful planning, and field support help utilities build confidence in adopting these technologies.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.

What if a farmer, conservation manager, or utility operator could question decades of NASA water data in plain language—and get information tailored to a real decision?

Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead for NASA, explains how the agency is working to move Earth science from vast public datasets into tools people can actually use.

Earth is NASA’s most studied planet, and advances in satellite resolution, computing power, and modeling are revealing how rainfall, snowpack, groundwater, and soil moisture interact as one system. The growing detail can reach the scale of individual reservoirs and agricultural regions, creating new possibilities for managing water and food production.

The challenge is translation. Peters describes how NASA’s Earth Action program starts with the decisions people face, then works backward to provide information at the right geographic scale and time frame without sacrificing scientific rigor.

One emerging example is Hydrology Copilot, a NASA-Microsoft project designed to make decades of runoff and snowpack data searchable through a conversational interface. Peters also explains how forecasts can give communities valuable time before droughts and floods, and how satellite observations are being combined with field monitoring in the Chesapeake Bay to track harmful algal blooms, sediment, and turbidity.

The most interesting shift may be from asking what happened to understanding what is happening now—and what could happen next. The work ahead is getting that knowledge through the final few inches between a screen and the person making the decision.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability. This episode is from a conversation at the Reservoir Center in Washington, D.C.

What’s actually eating away at the concrete inside our sewer systems? The answer takes us into a world of bacteria, sulfuric acid, and chemical reactions happening beneath our streets.

In this episode, Joseph Talley of Imerys provides a deep dive into the chemistry of wastewater corrosion. He breaks down how the process starts, what it does to concrete, and why understanding those reactions matters when choosing how to repair the damage.

There’s some fascinating materials science in the response, too. Talley explains how calcium aluminate linings interact with that corrosive environment, using chemistry to neutralize acid and slow the bacteria producing it.

That science connects to a very practical question for utilities: can we get more life out of what’s already underground? From avoiding excavation in New Orleans’ French Quarter to evaluating a repaired treatment structure for four years in Washington, D.C., the conversation connects chemical reactions to construction decisions and the evidence needed to try something different.

Talley also describes work on thinner linings for new concrete, raising the possibility of putting that chemistry to work before the damage begins.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.

Learn more about this episode\'s sponsor Imerys.

After years of collecting and organizing data, the water sector appears to be reaching a turning point: AI is helping utilities put that information to work proactively.

In this episode, Seth Nickinson, Director of Product at SewerAI, brings the perspective of a software developer responding to what utilities need from AI—and what still makes them cautious.

He sees adoption accelerating as people bring experience with tools like ChatGPT into the workplace, along with firsthand knowledge of their limitations.

That puts trust at the center of the conversation: an AI tool needs to understand the questions utility staff are asking and work reliably with their system’s records.

The practical opportunities often involve time-consuming work, such as analyzing inspection histories or preparing the same findings for different audiences. SewerAI’s new Command Center offers one example, letting users ask questions about their inspection records and digital maps in everyday language.

AI is also shortening the path from a customer’s request to a new software capability, changing how quickly developers can respond to local needs.

An equally important challenge is preserving the knowledge of retiring employees who understand why their particular sewer system behaves the way it does.

Protecting those records raises questions about where data goes and whether outside AI providers can use it for training.

Looking ahead, Nickinson expects more analysis to happen directly inside inspection robots and sensors rather than on distant servers.

His vision is an assistant that helps utilities adapt a maintenance schedule when a storm arrives or equipment fails, connecting accumulated knowledge to the decisions crews face that day.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.

Saving water is one challenge; finding the money to build conservation projects is another.

The fourth episode of Resilience In The Rockies examines how Colorado communities are assembling federal, state, local, and private funding to turn water-efficiency ideas into infrastructure, with WaterNow helping local partners identify opportunities, navigate complex grant programs, and strengthen applications.

Along the Rio Grande near Del Norte, partners combined a $1.2 million Bureau of Reclamation WaterSMART grant with state funding, private philanthropy, and contributions from water users to modernize the Farmers Union diversion, which serves 12 other ditches.

The rebuilt diversion improves agricultural water delivery while adding fish passage, automated head gates, streambank stabilization, and aquatic habitat—giving multiple interests a reason to invest in the same project.

In Alamosa, a failing irrigation system at Cattails Golf Course had pushed a planned city project to about $1.3 million, until a $500,000 WaterSMART grant helped close the funding gap.

The upgrade replaced more than 10,000 feet of leaking pipe and added precise irrigation controls that allow staff to reduce watering in roughs and other lower-priority areas during drought; the city says the system has been saving about a dozen acre-feet of water annually in recent dry years.

Greeley faced a much larger infrastructure problem as aging meter batteries began failing across a system with roughly 29,000 meters, leaving the utility with estimated readings and little ability to spot leaks quickly.

About $3.5 million in federal WaterSMART grants helped accelerate Greeley’s move to advanced metering infrastructure, giving the utility 15-minute usage data, improving meter accuracy, reducing manual reading routes, and giving customers much faster information about leaks and their own water use.

Across the three projects, the lesson is straightforward: conservation is infrastructure, and expanding it at meaningful scale requires capital, partnerships, staff capacity, and often outside expertise to help communities compete for the funding that makes projects possible.

Resilience In The Rockies is a waterloop series produced in collaboration with WaterNow and made possible in part by a grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, with support from PCL Construction, Norris Design, Merrick, and the City of Greeley.

Colorado communities are treating public engagement as water infrastructure, using trusted messengers, targeted outreach, and practical programs to turn conservation strategies into action.

The third episode of Resilience in the Rockies examines how Summit County, Boulder, and Aurora are reaching people who can determine whether water-saving programs actually work, plus how technical assistance from WaterNow enables the programs.

In Summit County, High Country Conservation Center helps connect more than 15 water providers, several mountain towns, residents, businesses, and landscapers through rebates, irrigation assessments, training, and demonstration gardens.

That regional role matters because local utilities often lack the staff capacity to design and run conservation programs while also operating treatment plants, repairing leaks, and serving customers.

Boulder is taking a different approach as it rethinks how to reach a community where more than half of residents are renters and the University of Colorado brings roughly 40,000 students with widely different connections to local water issues.

After reducing per-capita water use by about 30 percent since 2002, the city is developing a new conservation communications strategy that focuses on people often missed by traditional government outreach.

That work includes plain-language communication, translation, accessibility for people using assistive devices, and more deliberate outreach to residents who may not already have strong connections to city government.

In Aurora, where more than 180 languages are spoken, the challenge is building understanding of water reuse in a city that imports water from several major river basins and relies on Prairie Waters to stretch existing supplies.

Aurora Water, Metro Water Recovery, and the Aurora Health Alliance are working with public health professionals as trusted messengers, giving them direct exposure to drinking water treatment, wastewater processes, and reuse so they can answer questions from patients and community members with greater confidence.

Across all three communities, the lesson is that conservation programs become more effective when people understand the choices in front of them, trust the information they receive, and have a clear path to act on it.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability. Resilience in the Rockies is produced in collaboration with WaterNow and made possible in part by a grant from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, with support from PCL Construction, Norris Design, Merrick, and the City of Greeley.

Indoor residential water use in American homes has fallen 44 percent over three decades, as more efficient fixtures and appliances allow people to perform the same daily tasks with far less water.

Peter Mayer, principal engineer at WaterDM and lead author of all three Residential End Uses of Water studies, explains the findings from the Water Research Foundation’s 2026 update.

The study draws on billing records from 52 utilities across the United States and Canada, along with high-resolution data from more than 69,000 single-family homes and 1,000 multifamily homes.

Average indoor use in single-family homes dropped from 69.3 gallons per person per day in 1999 to 38.5 gallons in 2026.

Clothes washers produced the largest savings, cutting per-person water use from laundry by nearly 68 percent as federal energy standards pushed manufacturers toward more efficient machines.

Toilet use also declined sharply, with the average flush volume falling from roughly 3.5 gallons in 1999 to 1.84 gallons today.

These gains came primarily from national plumbing codes, energy standards, and better technology—not dramatic changes in household behavior.

The study examined multifamily housing for the first time and found that indoor use in small, individually metered buildings averaged 39.8 gallons per person per day, remarkably close to single-family demand.

With indoor efficiency beginning to approach practical limits, the next major opportunity lies outdoors, where changing landscapes and irrigation systems will be more expensive and take decades—but could help growing communities stretch existing water supplies much further.

waterloop is a nonprofit news outlet exploring solutions for water sustainability.