Remember this?

Even if you haven’t chosen the vocation of plumber, between screensavers and Mario, you’ve had some experience with the complex nature of pipes.

In a world of cell phones, drones, and cloud computing it is easy to dismiss plumbing as a simple science. It’s easy to feel secure and confident in sturdy metal tubes when so much infrastructure today is glass, circuits, and radio waves.

What could go wrong with plumbing?

Well..for one, dangerous toxicity of drinking water can occur, as can carbon monoxide poisoning, and even oil spills. Plumbing, as boring and background noise as it is, is essential to contemporary life.

Let us count the ways we rely on plumbing on a daily basis:

domestic drinking water

septic

oil and petrochemicals

natural gas

...and those are just the common household examples.



One of the most noteworthy events that spurred massive installation of indoor plumbing was a dysentery outbreak that took place during the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. This incident killed nearly one hundred people and sickened 1,409 individuals. Hard to believe something like that happened in the 20th century, but shows just how well we take the public health benefits of plumbing for granted. In fact, it wasn’t until the 1950’s that indoor plumbing became part of most households. Bet you wouldn't have picked that on a multiple choice test!

So… If most plumbing was installed between 1933 and 1955, not to mention all the plumbing that went into place during various development bubbles, this means America has more than 2.5 millions of major pipes to maintain (that is larger than the moon’s orbital length, just to put it in perspective.)





Current major pipelines in the US

If 30 seconds is how long most people can survive without air, and 3 days is how long most people can survive without water, between, air, water, and food-- water is the second most urgent necessity for survival. This nutrient, which sustains us -- more than 230 million just in the US are dependent upon these millions of miles of pipe.

Unfortunately, these pipes are nearing their expiration date. Most piping needs refitting or replaced within 50 years. It is suggested that all piping is replaced within 100 years of installation.

If our oldest pipes are around 83 years of age if we did the, a significant chunk of America’s pipe infrastructure has less than 20 years remaining. Now, if replacing and refitting millions of miles of pipe within 17 years seems impossible to you, you would probably be right. Short of a national mandate which compels high school graduates to spend two years plumbing before they can enter college or the workforce, what’s an alternative approach to seeing this herculean feat accomplished?

One place we begin is mapping these millions of miles of pipe with plumber drones, sensors -- and perhaps even Hexagon Geospatial’s Smart M.App. Mapping the pipes of the nation could give residents, governments, and contractors a proactive edge against plumbing problems. With maintenance drones observing the external conditions and smart sensors monitoring flow and pressure, the devices would aggregate a five-dimensional (yep, five) map that not only provides information on location, but also conditions over time, providing people, governments, and plumbers essential insight into the prioritization of service.



To learn more about how this, and other feats of multi-dimensional mapping might be accomplished, check out our IGNITE your M.App Challenge, presented by Hexagon Geospatial.