The Portland Water Bureau has committed to providing outstanding water service to its customers. One of the Bureau’s budgetary performance measures is that less than 5% of the customers shall experience a cumulative water outage for no more than 8 hours a year, and emergency outages shall be limited to 24 hours for all mains up to 16” in diameter. For monitoring and accounting purposes the Bureau requires an application to automate the documentation of customer outages. This will allow the Bureau to rapidly and effectively provide statistics for the performance budget measure. It will also allow the bureau to analyze trends and performance.

GeoNorth was contracted by the Portland Water Bureau to develop an outage reporting application. This first project task will support the collection of outage information for fiscal year 2007-08 beginning on 7/1/07. For this reason it was urgent that the project be completed before the start of the FY07-08.

The other subsequent major tasks in this project, which will be completed at a later date under a separate project, include:

• Field crew reporting to include mapping
• Management reporting

GeoNorth recently completed the design and development an application and database for tracking the details of scheduled and unscheduled water outage events. The Water Outage Tracking Application (WOTA) is integrated with a separate ArcGIS valve isolation tool and is used to capture and store asset and customer information related to outages. The application provides both data entry and query functionality. The application features the unique ability to preview data in a form or a grid display to accommodate user requirements.

The database uses a hierarchical structure based on a master shutdown record which can contain multiple phase records which in turn can contain multiple asset records. Users can add additional outage phases which in turn will add additional assets. The application feature validation and informs the user when an outage record has been modified or in the event there is incorrect or missing required information. The configuration for the application which manages data connections and individual user interface preferences is stored in a XML file that can be easily modified. User and technical documentation was produced.

The application was completed under budget and ahead of schedule. The application is in production collecting scheduled and unscheduled outage information for each affected customer.