Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/59336
prawling across an island in the St. Lawrence Seaway, Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and among the largest in North America. It's consistently voted one of the "most livable" cities in the world and has been named a UNESCO City by Design. Yet, like most historic cities, Montreal is coping with the costly deterioration of its water and wastewater infrastructure. The price tag for repairs is an estimated $4 billion during the next 20 years. S In 2002, the government of Quebec implemented a water policy urging all municipalities to achieve an infrastructure renewal rate of 1 percent per annum by 2012. To be eligible for financial assistance on infrastructure programs, municipalities were required to complete intervention plans by 2007. The city of Montreal initiated a 10-year process of planning all the different interventions required to modernize its water network. The city laid out its plans for short-term inter- vention and long-term investment in the water and wastewater networks. The goal was to prioritize areas that require rehabilitation, renovation and replace- ment as well as eliminate maintenance backlog. The challenge was to use taxpayer dollars efficiently and effectively in the process. The intervention plan identified best practices in asset management, including deployment of a water and wastewater network GIS based on software sup- plied by Bentley Systems. The city developed the GIS over a five-year period at a cost of $20 million. Completed in 2010, the GIS supports asset man- agement, decision making and lifecycle planning. It also fulfills the government of Quebec's guidelines requiring data to be presented in digital format so progress toward infrastructure renewal can be bench- marked across all municipalities. Staging an Intervention The city of Montreal's 12,387-kilometer network of water and wastewater pipes serves 1.8 million citi- zens. Leaks and breaks have caused the loss of up to 40 percent of city water before it reaches customer taps. Two-thirds of city sewer mains still combine stormwater and sewerage—a good indicator of the infrastructure's age. A critical maintenance backlog and chronic underfunding have contributed to ever- increasing network failures. Montreal's problems are indicative of the state of infrastructure throughout Quebec, in particular, and North America, in general. In the past, the lack of proper information about the water and wastewater networks forced asset managers into a reactive maintenance strategy, where repairs were made in response to network failure or near fail- ure. Decision making about network management involved laborious analysis of paper plans archived in the boroughs and municipalities where the pipes were located. Decentralized information exacerbated the problem of planning network maintenance. The intervention plan identified the need for centralized asset manage- ment, which required the digitization and centralization of network information. Putting a network GIS in place has enabled asset managers to accurately assess the maintenance backlog, prioritize projects and funding, and predict the lifecycle investment required for a sus- tainable maintenance strategy. The city of Montreal's water and wastewater network GIS provides tools for scanning and identifying asset attributes. MARCH 2O12 / WWW . GEOPLA CE . COM 15 CITY OF MONTREAL