Unlocking Digital Transformation in Water Infrastructure

TREVOR ENGLISH: Welcome, everyone, to unlocking digital transformation in water infrastructure. I'm Trevor English. I'm the product marketing manager for Autodesk's desktop hydraulic modeling solutions. With me is Shelby L. Smith. She is the CIM manager at JMT. She'll be speaking towards the end of the presentation. But you're stuck with me for this first half.

And so in this presentation, we're going to talk about the impact of new digital tools on managing water infrastructure. And before we get into the overview of what we're going to cover, we do first just need to talk about the safe harbor statement. So as always, if we present anything or make any forward-looking statements in this presentation, please do not make any buying or purchasing decisions based upon that.

So with the safe harbor statement presented, let's talk about what we're going to cover in unlocking digital transformation in water. We're going to start off by talking about the big challenges facing the water sector and the big challenges that are facing our industry and the different angles that we need to overcome, as we are building the next generation of water infrastructure. We'll then talk about the impact that digital transformation and new technology are having on the water industry.

And then also talk about the practical examples through the lens of customer stories and projects for digital transformations in water. And then I'll hand it over to Shelby, who's going to dive even deeper into JMT's experience with adopting new digital tools and the workflows they used on a project building the low battery seawall or rebuilding the low battery seawall in Charleston, South Carolina.

So with that overview out of the way, let's talk a little bit about the state of the water industry. For those of you watching this presentation, you likely are associated with the water industry in some form or fashion and have characterized it as a race to survive. So let's talk about why we took that framing and why we're talking about it that way. So we're facing challenges in a number of different sectors, starting off with water distribution.

We're seeing high demand, roughly 55% increase in water demand by 2050. As populations grow and get more dense and urban regions, the demand for clean, potable water is increasing drastically over the next 30 or 25 or so years. In addition to that increase in demand, we're also seeing a water shortage. Five billion people could suffer from water shortages during that same period due to our inability, or lacking water infrastructure, to distribute that clean, potable water to these populations.

But a part of those populations are also being impacted by drought. Roughly 685 million people in cities will face a decline in the availability of their drinking water. So on the distribution side, we're seeing struggles and challenges, big challenges facing a majority of the US population and the global population for the ability to get clean, potable drinking water. But we're also seeing these big challenges in the stormwater and flood side of the industry as well.

As you've likely seen in the news, the significance of extreme flooding events are increasing in frequency. What was a 100-year or 50-year storm just 10, 20 years ago is now happening every 10 years or 20 years. The stormwater models that we're using for our planning and development of stormwater and flood infrastructure are rapidly changing as the climate changes.

With that, roughly $1 trillion of built infrastructure is at risk from inland flooding over this next 25 years, that same period we were talking about before. And roughly 800 million people are the number of urban residents that could be impacted during that period from these coastal and sea and tidal changes, which JMT will talk about a little bit further in how they're project took a practical lens of protecting the city of Charleston from some of those tidal changes.

So we're seeing these huge changes and challenges in the distribution sector. We're also seeing them in the stormwater and flood sector. We're being hit from both angles and both sides of the water industry. But we're also facing other challenges as well. If you're watching this class, you likely understand that water and the water industry is associated pretty heavily with the rest of civil infrastructure and the rest of the world as we know it. It's important. And it's a significant driver of GDP globally.

But the other challenge we're facing is retention and recruitment. This is coming from both sides as well. Over the next 10 years, it's estimated that the water industry will lose about 1.7 million workers through retirement. And that's causing challenges. These are some of the most skilled workers who have worked with these systems and these water distribution systems and stormwater systems for their whole career. And they have a number of information and nuances and knowledge about their system that might not be captured in data or might not be captured in plans or anything.

So we're losing that knowledge. We're losing that skill set. But we're also failing to supply the industry with the necessary number of workers with the necessary skills to handle these big challenges that the water industry is facing. So through these three big challenges, we're going to talk about how the industry and how you can overcome them and achieve sustainable outcomes with new technology.

And to underscore that a little bit further, in the last five years or so, roughly 66% of water utilities have adopted some new form of digital tool to improve their workflows and help them handle these water challenges. Be that more efficient workers or help them understand their stormwater network, or help them understand their water distribution network better so that they can make impactful changes. But let's talk a little bit further about digital transformation and what that term means because right now, it's probably in this marketing buzzword territory for you.

But we need to take it out of that field and look at it in practical terms and what it actually means for you. And the best way to do that is by looking at data. So I want you to remember these three key points. These are going to be the lens that we view the rest of this class through, the rest of our digital transformation journey through. And these are data points based on a survey from the International Water Association, which surveyed 64 global water utilities.

So there, of course, will be regional trends. But this perspective takes a global perspective, global view on utilities approaches here to digital transformation. So with that said, we'll start first with water distribution pressures are often a catalyst for innovation. And stepping back, I think this makes sense. The water distribution sector is the one we can most closely tie towards economic improvements and benefits.

Improvements in our water distribution system and our understanding of how we distribute clean, potable water, like decreasing non-revenue water or providing for efficient pump operation, can be directly tied to cost savings or an increase in revenue from your water distribution system. And that leads to point two, is that economic and cost saving benefits are often the key driver of innovation for digital transformation.

And this makes sense as well. While we'd all like to just push forward the industry for the sake of the industry, at the end of the day, we do have to tie our work back to some form of economic and cost saving benefits, whether that be our specific project or our workflows throughout our company, or the abilities that we're able to have in distributing clean water or protecting our catchment and our population from these life-changing floods.

So these lenses, water distribution often is the first place that these utilities are embracing digital transformation. That digital transformation often happens when it can be closely tied to economic and cost saving benefits. But the third point, while it might seem negative, I want to cast in a positive light. So the third point being adoption is diverse and disjointed. And looking back at these previous two points, I think that also makes sense as well.

If we're embracing new tools and embracing digital transformation in the regions of our industry and the sectors of our industry that make the most sense first, we need to then understand that it's going to happen in a diverse and disjointed manner. But as Autodesk or as workers in the water industry need to understand and make it as easy as possible to embrace digital transformation in new sectors of the industry when we're ready, when the economic benefits are presented in those new sectors.

We need to ensure that data can translate between one side of the industry to the next, that our workflows and the work that we already did embracing digital transformation in one sector can translate to the other and make it even easier. So remember these lenses. And let's look at practical examples through these lenses. So first, an Autodesk customer, Davidson Water, built a digital twin of their water distribution network inside of InfoWater Pro.

They were able to develop this digital twin, match it up to the reality of their operating conditions throughout their network, and run surge analysis, and strategically identify where in their system needed pipe replacements and reduce leaks. And through the adoption of this digital twin workflow and the adoption of this new technology, were able to decrease leaks by 36% over 10 years. And so not only are we seeing benefits in the operations of the water distribution system.

But like I mentioned before, that directly leads to a decrease in non-revenue water. And they can tie their adoption of digital tools into revenue benefits. But this isn't just happening on the distribution side. It's also happening on the stormwater and flood side. So another Autodesk customer, the City of Fayetteville, leveraged InfoWorks ICM to build a digital twin of their stormwater and sanitary sewer network. And they were able to couple that model with their existing data inside of HEC-HMS and HEC-RAS that was historical data, but was not giving them the capability and the visibility into their network that they needed that InfoWorks ICM provided to allow them to take a worst first approach and strategically determine throughout their network what bits of the infrastructure could be replaced and make the most impact on their resiliency and stormwater protection.

And through that digital twin model, through that replacement strategy, were able to save $25 million over a 10-year period. So we talked about distribution. We talked about how economic benefits can be tied to both distribution and stormwater and flood. But again, in this positive light, I want to talk about the disjointed and disconnected adoption of digital transformation tools.

And that's why I brought JMT into this class because they've long been pioneers in adopting new tools in the ACO space. They've long adopted Civil 3D and other Autodesk software solutions. But they had yet to adopt any of our water software. And they were tasked with rebuilding the low battery seawall in Charleston, which you'll hear more from Shelby here in a bit about that project.

But they needed to design the drainage structures, a very complex drainage system. Oftentimes the outlets of these drainage pipes were under the tide, under the water. And they needed a system that worked with their Civil 3D parts and their Civil 3D models. And remember back to what I talked about data and understanding this disjointed nature is going to happen. So we need to build an ecosystem that allows that data to flow from one side of the industry to the other, from our civil design to our hydraulic model.

So they chose to adopt InfoDrainage for the first time on this project and were able to go from civil design to InfoDrainage and back to civil design and work within this shared ecosystem and this shared space. And a lot of the workflows that they were used to in their digital transformation journey in other sectors and other solutions translated over to their adoption of InfoDrainage as well.

And so with that, they were able to build this seawall and protect the city of Charleston for another 100 years. And of course, you'll hear more from Shelby here in a bit. And we'll talk a little bit more about JMT towards the end of this class. But remember, these three lenses that we're viewing digital transformation through. And that's what digital transformation is.

It's just a way of embracing new technologies and new tools. So let's back up a little bit. Let's talk about BIM, Building Information Modeling. It's long been the backbone of digital transformation in the AC space as a whole. But I don't want to focus in on BIM. I think that's sometimes a foreign term to us in hydraulic modeling and in water. I want to focus on a term on this page that's in the subdescription there being data.

I've mentioned data before. But at the end of the day, data is what enables us to digitally transform. Where we're at on our data journey informs how we're able to embrace digital transformation, whether we need to collect the data or whether we just need to figure out how to simulate the data or whether we need to figure out how to take that data and transform it into actionable outcomes.

And we're often doing that through the lens of these four different silos here down at the bottom, the plan, design, build, and operate, and maintain phases. If you're watching this, you probably generally operate within one of those silos. But as our ability to take data and manipulate that data and share that data increases with new digital tools, we're seeing the barriers between these four different sectors of the water industry start to break down.

And a planner is talking to an operator, as we'll talk about here in a bit through practical examples. We're seeing the ecosystem, the barriers and the silos, start to break down. And more efficient outcomes are taking place based on our ability to create, manage, and use data, to deliver projects digitally, to develop digital twins, to utilize these data across the entire life cycle. So that takes us to the core technologies of digital transformation.

We talked about data. We need to be able to simulate that data. We need to be able to run hydraulic analysis and simulations and develop learnings and outcomes based on what the data is telling us and what we need to do to improve our water infrastructure. But for anybody that has utilized hydraulic modeling software and for anybody who has seen hydraulic analysis capabilities get more and more complex, and as your meshes get more and more complex and you get closer to modeling the accurate reality, the accurate situation of what's actually happening in the software, but what's happening in real world, your simulations get more exhaustive.

They take a long time. In the days of past, even 10 years ago, running a hydraulic simulation meant expensive compute power or taking up time on your own machine. And you had to go do something else. And you couldn't be as productive. So we need to democratize the ability to ingest data and to simulate and take outcomes from that data. And that's where technologies like the cloud and machine learning come into play.

It gives small utilities the same access and capabilities to understanding and learning as large utilities. Small consultants the same access as large consultants. It democratizes the ability to digitally transform. But let's look at this through another lens and talk about a practical example here.

So I talked about the silos that we often view the industry through, the plan, design, build, and operations and maintenance phases. And usually we're going to sit along one of those silos. But as data becomes more accessible and digital transformation occurs, those silos are breaking down. But that's also occurring when we look at the sector through another lens.

In essence, we're all doing something to help a drop of water go from cloud to sea. We're sitting along this life cycle in this ecosystem in some way, whether that be in the water structures, stormwater and flood, sustainable drainage, et cetera. You can see that life cycle there on screen. But as digital transformation occurs and we're able to develop learnings from our data using new models, this ecosystem and life cycle is getting a little bit more crisscrossy.

Your stormwater and flood departments are being able to help your wastewater treatment departments run better. And your planning side from stormwater and flood is helping operations and maintenance on your wastewater treatment plant. But that's not just theory. Let's talk about that through practical example.

So Trinity River Authority is a regional utility down here in Texas where I am based. And they have a very large catchment, a lot of treatment plants, and a lot of stormwater systems. Their stormwater department created a digital twin of their stormwater and sanitary sewer network, validated that model through flow meters, were able to create an accurate digital twin and verify that. That helped them fantastically in their planning and design and build side of the stormwater system.

Those direct economic benefits, like I talked about, were tied to their adoption of these new digital tools. But their team was tasked with being a little bit more innovative and being a little bit more forward thinking and finding solutions that were maybe outside their purview. And their stormwater modeler had connections to their wastewater treatment plant operator. And specifically, they knew that several of their wastewater treatment plants within their catchment suffered from extremely long tails after heavy rain events.

Essentially, the flow rates into these wastewater treatment plants were extended and heightened for an extended period of time after heavy rains. And so the stormwater team wondered, hey, is this digital model, this digital twin model that we have, capable of modeling that, predicting that flow data? And is that able to help these treatment plant operators better do their jobs? And the answer was yes.

They were able to accurately model in advance or in past and in future, and then validate those models as well through measured flow rates, the flow rates into those treatment plants, which helped those treatment plant operators be able to accurately predict chemical dosage, have that on hand and be prepared for how long this tail event was going to happen. As somebody from Trinity River mentioned, it's almost like a mythical creature had appeared.

The planning data was able to help the operations team on the wastewater treatment plant. Two teams that never would have worked together, that never would have informed each other's departments and workflows, now by having this ecosystem and the ability to take learnings from this data is increasing everybody's productivity and efficiency. So we talked about how we're able to generate these positive outcomes through technology and digital transformation.

And these really boil down to three core outcomes. Our infrastructure is getting more resilient in that it is able to handle these more extreme weather events because we're able to model them in advance. We're able to understand them in advance. And we're able to build systems that coordinate with other aspects of built infrastructure. But our infrastructure is also becoming more sustainable as new digital tools are allowing us to model sustainable drainage systems, low impact developments.

It's not about building the biggest impermeable surface or the largest culvert anymore. We now have the ability to accurately understand what these sustainable drainage systems do and bring back some infiltration to our drainage structures rather than just brute forcing water and getting it to where we need to go. So our infrastructure is becoming more resilient. Our infrastructure is becoming more sustainable.

It's also becoming more efficient because we can model in advance all of the different scenarios and occurrences and understand what needs to happen and build the most efficient systems. Our infrastructure is becoming more efficient. But it's not just about infrastructure. It's also about people.

Our workforce, with the adoption of new digital tools, are also becoming more resilient. Their practices are becoming more sustainable. And they're becoming more efficient. Our workforce can do more with less, with powerful digital tools that are democratized through technologies like cloud and AI. Their workflows become more sustainable.

And when they end up retiring, they can translate to the new workforce because they're in this shared ecosystem. And they become more efficient because you don't have to leave your computer while it's running a hydraulic simulation. And you can keep doing other work through the cloud.

So we talked about these outcomes and how they help us address these big challenges facing distribution and stormwater and flood and how it's helping our infrastructure and our workforce. But our workforce faces other challenges as well. So how do we solve those workforce challenges?

Well, in part we need to make sure that the people who enter the workforce are properly trained on these new digital tools. And that's why Autodesk this last summer made all of our hydraulic modeling software, InfoDrainage, InfoWorks ICM, InfoWater Pro, and InfoWorks WS Pro completely free to educators and students around the globe. And this is a story I've heard frequently in that hydraulic modelers who might be experts today entered the workforce after getting a civil engineering or environmental engineering degree and were just tossed hydraulic modeling software and told to learn it because nobody at the firm knew it or nobody at the utility knew it.

And they needed to understand how it worked. And they needed somebody who understood hydraulic modeling. And that doesn't enable the workforce to be as efficient as possible, to do everything possible within these advanced hydraulic modeling tools. So we need to train the workforce. And we need to do that before they enter the workforce.

So we can help mitigate some of the otherwise disaster from all of this expertise leaving the workforce through retirement by making our tools, share data and capture that data, and make it efficient in the workflows. But we can also make sure that we're preparing the workforce and supplying the workforce with more workers and solve the workforce challenges that way.

But there's another angle here too. And so we do need to talk about AI and machine learning a little bit. And some of you might have had an eye roll at the mention of AI and machine learning, as of course, it's very topical right now. It's been the talk of the town of that it's going to solve everything. And at Autodesk we're trying to take a little bit more fair approach to what machine learning can do and make sure that it's applicable and in essence building a groundwork for ensuring that we can adopt the advances in technologies that will occur over the next several years, but make sure the solutions that we roll out today are actually solving real world problems.

So around this time last year, we rolled out the machine learning deluge tool, which is essentially a stormwater modeling capability based on 10,000 hydraulic analyzes that is able to develop a flood map of a certain site surface based on machine learning algorithms. And what that means is it's roughly 25 times faster than traditional hydraulic analysis because the calculations aren't physically being run.

The machine learning model is developing the flood map for you. Over the last year, we rolled out several different improvements that improved the interactivity of this model. You can move, as you just saw in that video, move a pond around or a stormwater control around. And the flood map automatically updates without having to update that deluge analysis.

And so relatively minor improvements in the workflows. We're going from minutes to seconds. But we're creating this highly accurate model that allows for interactivity. So thinking about future state, and think back to the safe harbor mentioned there at the beginning, but think about future state. We're building this groundwork.

What if the model could suggest to you where you need to place your stormwater controls based on the machine learning algorithm? What if it could tell you what site grading you needed to do, or what was the most optimal location for buildings, or et cetera? This interactivity and the capabilities possible and potential of machine learning is significant.

So we have to make sure that we build this groundwork, that we get engineers and modelers used to leveraging machine learning and AI so that they can embrace the changes that occur down the line. But it's not just about embracing changes that occur down the line.

It's also happening now. It's making real world impact. We had a customer, Project Center Limited, leverage the machine learning deluge tool on their development of a solar field in the UK. They created a deluge map with the interactive machine learning deluge tool and were essentially able to develop a map of where ponding and channeling was occurring on their site surface.

Now, lucky for them, because it was in the UK, it rained. And they were able to go out to the site, take a photo of exact locations, measure depth. And that matched up perfectly to the machine learning deluge model that they had developed before even taking observed rainfall measurements. The machine learning algorithm was creating faster site analysis for them.

It was incredibly stable, as they adjusted that site surface. And it was allowing for iterative design. So we're seeing machine learning be highly accurate, highly efficient, and increase these workflows. But this is just the groundwork. We're building a solution so that we can embrace new technologies down the line.

Just like how cloud has democratized our ability to run complex simulations, AI may eventually democratize our ability to build more sustainable outcomes and get more learnings from the data that we do have. So we've talked at a high level about how to approach digital transformation, about the technologies and the outcomes we can achieve by embracing digital transformation.

So let's now look a little bit deeper at the case studies that we presented at the beginning of how customers are actively using new digital tools in their digital transformation journey. As mentioned before, the city of Fayetteville, we already know they saved $25 million over roughly 10 years by implementing an InfoWorks ICM model. And they were facing challenges in a number of areas.

They had limited data, so they had those existing HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS models. But they also had planning and resource constraints, as most utilities do. And they also had to convince their stakeholders and get buy-in for funding for this large-scale flood project. As I mentioned at the beginning, we often see innovation in water distribution first because it has a direct impact on stakeholders and customers.

And it can lead to this direct economic impact. When it comes to stormwater and flood modeling, we're often dealing with potential events. We're not dealing with real time events. We're dealing with protecting ourselves from a future state, which is often harder to convince people that this is an important investment.

And so with new graphical tools, like our available inside of InfoWorks ICM, they're able to accurately model their watershed and their catchment and show stakeholders who might not be hydraulic modelers and might not even be engineers, exactly where the water level is going to be and exactly what's going to happen if they don't make these improvements to their infrastructure.

So as I mentioned, they implemented a worst first prioritization to tackle critical flooding. And they did that by essentially creating flood maps in a combination with InfoWorks ICM and their historical HEC-RAS and HEC-HMS data. And then they were able to pinpoint the areas of their catchment that were most at risk from severe flooding events. And they were able to overlay all of the inundations from different year storms, as you can see in the bottom right there, and color code that so that you could see which areas were the most at risk to the most number of storms, and then implement changes to that specific bit of infrastructure.

So again, like I mentioned, it's no longer about building more impervious surfaces and building larger culverts and just brute forcing your stormwater. You can take an informed approach to know exactly what's going to happen from these models before it even happens and build infrastructure that you're confident in is going to work, and from that confidence, convince stakeholders to provide funding for your project because if they don't, you can show them exactly what's going to happen.

So we mentioned stormwater. But now let's turn back to water distribution and talk a little bit more about what Davidson Water did. They were facing challenges, like many utilities do, with aging infrastructure, aging PVC pipes, water hammer effects, and pump replacement challenges. Essentially, they were facing many of the challenges that faced water distribution industries and the water distribution sector from all different angles, pumps, water hammers, pipes, et cetera.

And they needed to understand what was happening most, what was going to make the most impact if they addressed it, but also understand all of those challenges in one system. So they leveraged InfoWater Pro's transient analysis capabilities and built a digital twin of InfoWater Pro or digital twin of their network inside of InfoWater Pro. And then they were also able to optimize their pump replacement, figure out where their pumps needed to be replaced in the most optimal ways, identify potential transient pressures from turning on and off those pumps or shutting valves, and then implement comprehensive mitigation strategies, take an informed approach to their maintenance and operations, but also make informed planning decisions, and then also inform the design side.

Again, those silos are breaking down between these different sectors. And having a model and having capabilities that allow data to go and be leveraged throughout these different silos is impactful. And it's making real world change. Like I mentioned, 36% decrease in leaks over 10 years after replacing PVC with ductile iron pipes. It prevented some of the breakage and the transient risks that their network had.

So you're about done having to listen to me. I'm about to hand it over to Shelby. But I do want to set her up and give some context for JMT and this project. Charleston is an incredibly flat city. The grade is nearly nonexistent. And they were susceptible to high tidal swings.

For the last 100 years, they were protected by the low battery seawall, or a portion of the city was. And that protected them against what was known about stormwater and tidal changes at the time. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this presentation, those models are changing.

Stormwater and flood levels are rising and sea levels are rising. So you need a new wall. And you need new systems that are able to protect the city from that. So they leveraged InfoDrainage in conjunction with their Civil 3D for civil design. And they were able to develop a sustainable and accurate drainage model within InfoDrainage that worked with their civil designs.

But the graphical nature of InfoDrainage also helped them as well. As Shelby will talk a little bit more about, it was able to help them understand and show stakeholders, like I mentioned with ICM, but now with InfoDrainage, exactly where water levels were going to be on car tires and show what was going to happen when storms came and what the infrastructure that they were building would do to prevent risk and prevent damage from the future.

So with that said, I'll be quiet and hand it over to Shelby, who will talk a little bit more about InfoDrainage, Civil 3D, and JMT's approach on the low battery seawall.

SHELBY SMITH: Thank you, Trevor. My name is Shelby, and I am the Autodesk Sim manager with JMT. JMT was excited to be involved in the historic low battery seawall and the reconstruction project of it in Charleston, South Carolina. Let's talk a little bit about the history of the seawall to begin.

The original wall was constructed between 1909 and 1911 with a second phase of construction in 1917 to 1919. Here we see an existing photo of the original low battery seawall. The wall was constructed on wooden pilings with cobblestone, oyster shell, and granite rubble foundations and oyster shell roadways. The seawall was beginning to deteriorate after 100 years from the elements and flooding events.

The Ashley River was surcharging over the seawall and flooding the local roadway and the sidewalks and the surrounding homes. The existing seawall was at an 8-foot elevation and NGVD 29 datum. And we will be using the NGVD's 29 datum when we're talking about elevations going forward.

After phase one of the project was completed, the Army Corps of Engineers conducted a study to examine what height the seawall needed to be at to combat sea level rising. They determined that it needed a 13-foot elevation. However, phase one of the project was only constructed to a 9.5-foot elevation, raising the wall by a foot and a half.

After phase one was completed, they re-examined the structure of the wall and determined that the structural foundations could handle an increase in wall height to 13 feet. Here we have a typical section provided in phase three of the project showing the low battery walkway and the foot and a half rise in elevation to 9.5 feet. On the right hand side, you can see the existing grade, demonstrating the rise in elevation from where it had been at the existing conditions.

To match the 13-foot requirement by the Army Corps of Engineers, we have the ability to continue building upon the wall as constructed. Here is a demonstration that had been installed for the low battery, showcasing a glass panel that can be used to replace the railing and increase the wall height by an additional two feet. It keeps the integrity of the wall and allows the community to still enjoy the harbor and the Ashley River.

What's unique about this project is that the Army Corps of Engineers, they're requiring a wall height. However, we don't want to obscure and ruin the integrity of the historic Charleston area by simply building a wall. They combined the aesthetics and the function by providing a space for the community to gather and enjoy the Ashley River and the harbor with also providing that flooding protection.

This is an image from the early 2000s showing how the Ashley River and the Charleston Harbor just overtopped the low battery seawall, flooding the entire surrounding area. The city of Charleston requires a tailwater elevation of 6.48 feet. However, the high tide elevation is at approximately three feet. As part of the sea level rise strategy, the city of Charleston requires that 6.48 feet and a 10% increase in rainfall to help combat the sea level rise and increased storm events.

Although the tailwater elevation requirement is at 6.48 feet, many times the roadway and the sidewalk elevations are at 5 feet or less than. This is one of the intersections that we constructed. And as I was helping to design the ADA ramps and the sidewalks, many times our elevations were at 4.94 or 4.9 in the elevation. So the tailwater requirement that we're having to meet is actually a foot and a half above where your roadway elevation is.

The city of Charleston has a roadway requirement as part of that sea level rise strategy of 8.48 feet. They granted us a design exception due to the rise in the seawall height to provide that flood protection for the surrounding areas. By rising that seawall, we were protecting those areas. Although, we weren't meeting that design requirement of 8.48 feet.

As you can see in this image here, many of the outfalls that we were tying into as part of the project were below the high tide elevation. You can see the high tide water marks well above the outfall. In addition, there are barnacles all over the wall and the outfall pipe. For this project, in phase four we were excited to pilot and utilize InfoDrainage. We really wanted to leverage InfoDrainage for its interoperability and connected workflows with Civil 3D.

In this screen capture, I have both toolbars in the software. I have on the top in gray the ribbon from Civil 3D, and on the bottom the ribbon available in InfoDrainage. You can see the ability to import and export those pipe networks from Civil 3D into InfoDrainage and back. Additionally, we're able to connect our surface data into InfoDrainage.

We also leverage Civil 3D tools available to us to customize and accurately model and represent our stormwater design. We utilized the part builder inside of Civil 3D and created our own custom parts list for the South Carolina Department of Transportation, SCDOT, stormwater parts and structures. We were excited with the ability that InfoDrainage has to be able to map those parts between Civil 3D and InfoDrainage to better communicate those custom networks.

This is a view in Civil 3D object viewer showcasing those proposed pipe networks. In pink, you can see our proposed network and the structures. On the top right hand side, you can see the existing outfall that we're tying into with one of the manholes. And there's a water line that's transecting the entire site in blue.

By modeling these stormwater networks and the different utilities, we're able to see everything in real time and rotate it around viewing these models and being able to show this to other members of the design team. We love the animated views that are available in InfoDrainage. As you can see here, during one of the critical storm events, the pipes quickly fill to capacity and the HGL surcharges above the inlets and the existing grade.

This is the worst case scenario at a static tailwater instead of a tidal tailwater. Although those pipes were filling to capacity, let's remember how we are updating those undersized drainage systems for this project. On the left hand side are several pipes that were removed as part of the demolition during the construction phase of the low battery.

On the right hand side are the pipes and the systems that we were installing as drainage improvements. You can see the increased size capacity and the volume. Because the outfalls were below the tidal elevation for high tide, we needed to do something to protect the tide from coming back into the stormwater system. So we incorporated tidal valves.

They allow the stormwater to exit the system when the high tide is lower than the outfalls, but prevents the tide from pushing back into the system and taking up that capacity and volume during high tide events. Once again, we can visualize those real time events in the InfoDrainage software. Here we're looking at the deluge. The system is essentially showing us a warning that the system is flooding.

Once again, this is at a static tailwater event rather than the tidal, where you would see those ebbs and flows of the tide coming and going. This is another view of that same analysis. Here we're looking at a side view, where we can see the names of the structures. And once again, we see that flooding in real time.

We're able to see the Civil 3D surface and the flow errors depicting how the system is draining. We see those same triangles of the HGL pushing through the tops of the structures and the surface. What are our key takeaways and final thoughts? Well, we love InfoDrainage. And it's constantly continuing to advance. We did run into some hiccups as we had an early adoption of the software.

But Autodesk was extremely responsive and helpful throughout the entire process. We were excited to see that a lot of our feedback that we provided to them has since been incorporated into new versions and updates of the software. One of the examples is that we asked for HGL to be included in the reports. And they've delivered on it. So we really encourage you if you've tried an earlier version to continue looking at the newer versions of the software as they're constantly advancing it.

The animated results have a tremendous impact on our design, not only to be able to view how your analysis and your results are happening, but also to share with clients, the community, and also simply other project team members who may not be as involved in the stormwater design process. The interoperability between Civil 3D and InfoDrainage really drew us to incorporate the software into our design workflow.

We like the ability to be able to take our custom pipe networks from Civil 3D and push them into InfoDrainage, run that analysis, and bring that data back into our Civil 3D software, and coordinate our stormwater design to our civil infrastructure design. The reports generation through InfoDrainage is so easy and organized. It's easy for us to be sharing with our reviewing agencies and the ability to customize the headers on how those reports are generated.

We could easily add our JMT brand and customize the view of those reports. The pipe profiles are depicting those flood results in real time, showing us if there's any issues and what the problems are, how that stormwater analysis is running, and where is that HGL. It's exciting to share with the other project team members and translate that design and communicate how the stormwater is functioning.

As our stormwater engineer on this project said, embracing new technologies such as InfoDrainage helps to increase our efficiency and also produces a better product. Thank you so much for joining Trevor English and myself, Shelby L. Smith in this session.