Water-challenged state uses AI, satellites to find leaks

In 2022, residents in Chama, New Mexico, a Rocky Mountain village with less than 1,000 people near the Colorado border, seemingly overnight found their water taps had stopped working.

The state responded by sending in gallons of bottled water to prevent catastrophe. A subsequent investigation revealed that an unaddressed leak in the village’s water system caused the disruption. New Mexico sent Chama $800,000 in capital funds to fix it and other water infrastructure needs. But it wouldn't be the last time the village suffered a water-related incident, this summer residents had to restrict their water use after a plant shutdown.

The fragility of the water supply statewide has been on display for a while now, a dam near Albuquerque, its largest city, has been out of commission for three years. That and the other water-related incidents prompted New Mexico to unveil a 50-year action plan in January to address water scarcity.

A key component of that strategy is building and repairing public drinking water infrastructure to address water loss. New Mexico’s action plan estimates that water systems in the state lose between 40% and 70% of their treated drinking water due to breaks and leaks in their infrastructure. It is a similar story nationwide, as aging infrastructure results in cities large and small losing water.

New Mexico’s plan calls for deploying new technologies and sensors to spot leaks, and the state this month unveiled a partnership to do just that, alongside Google’s Public Sector arm and geospatial technology company Woolpert Digital Innovations. Under a project dubbed Hydro Delta, the state and its partners will use satellites and artificial intelligence to identify water leaks and alert local water utilities to them. It is expected to cost the state $474,000.

The effort is a recent example of how states are using AI to solve real-world problems. California, for example, began using AI last year to scan their cameras for smoke and other evidence of wildfires. For this sector, it means saving water, and saving municipalities and ratepayers millions of dollars.

“What's tricky about it is you don't know they're leaking, except over time, perhaps your output from the water facility has decreased, or sometimes, there is no water stock,” said Meta Hirschl, chief data and technology steward at the New Mexico Environment Department.

To find the leaks more quickly, Hydro Delta will continuously monitor satellite images for signs of potential water leaks, like changes in soil moisture, temperature and vegetation health.

If it finds an anomaly, like vegetation growing or moist soil in what was previously an arid part of the state, the platform will alert officials who can then investigate further. Many of those anomalies are not apparent to the human eye and are tough to monitor given the size and scale of the state’s water infrastructure.

“It's easy to visualize a plain dirt area, which in New Mexico, there are plenty of plain dirt areas,” Hirschl said. “If you have a time series that looks at the satellite imagery over five years, and you see there's all of a sudden a change in moisture or vegetation in this dirt area, you're suspicious.”

Water utilities are owned and controlled locally, and so may struggle with a lack of resources and staff to fix leaks, and the New Mexico Environment Department does not have the authority to carry out fixes itself as a regulatory agency. But Hirschl said the state has millions of dollars in unused infrastructure money, including from the federal government, that can be put to use helping local water agencies pay for capital improvements through grants and other opportunities.

“What's ironic is we actually have money that isn't used to fix infrastructure in New Mexico,” Hirschl said. “The reason is that we can't find the leaks or if we do, we don't have a way to mobilize. This is a way to mobilize…. We've got money. What we need to do is smartly spend it.”

Initially, Hydro Delta will use publicly available satellite images to help ensure that the system works as intended. In time, Hirschl said localities could have the anomaly data made available to them so they do not need to coordinate with the state as much, or offer residents the ability to share when they see any water issues through a smartphone app.

Hirschl also said the platform’s use of AI to look for anomalies could extend to other areas, like monitoring toxins in groundwater or the effects of methane. But with aging water infrastructure and a desperate desire to conserve more, this first use case will be key.

“It's a question of, can we identify those leaks earlier? Right now, we're probably going to be doing a lot of cleanup, but then when the new ones appear, we'll be able to catch those faster and do infrastructure upgrades, with the federal and state dollars,” Hirschl said.