ONLY ON FOX5: How SNWA uses technology, scuba divers to do underground inspections to protect our water supply

LAS VEGAS, Nev. (FOX5) - The Southern Nevada Water Authority explained the process and showed off their divers in action.

Providing a safe and reliable water system is a top priority for SNWA.

“We are looking for corrosion, exposed rebar, valves, if there is any damage to our valves,” said senior maintenance engineer Chris Augustine.

SNWA is diving into the newest technology.

“Remote-operated vehicles to get inside these reservoirs, unmanned, it is a little bit safer and a little bit quicker for us to respond to get into the equipment,” said Augustine.

They then bring in divers who go underground and into the reservoirs to do further inspections and make changes.

“These are things that we can identify and make recommendations on and get the divers here with the proper equipment and parts they need to perform the service,” said Augustine.

The scuba divers will open the hatch, go down into this reservoir to start their inspection.

“We use diving outfits,” said Augustine. “We have been using divers since the 80′s to do inspections of our reservoirs.”

Augustine said they also use what are called pipe crawlers which are robot-like devices with cameras that checks pipe and transmission lines.

“Great cameras on our pipe crawlers that can pan, tilt and zoom,” said Augustine. “We can take observations and create work orders for our operations and maintenance folks to come out and perform any repairs on things that we may find.”

SNWA gets their equipment from various vendors in places like Canada and Florida and the divers come from all over.

“There is a small outfit that lives here but they also go to California, Arizona and other parts so we definitely make sure that we get them scheduled in a timely fashion,” said Augustine.

Augustine shared how often they do these types of inspections.

“Sometimes it is an unplanned nature, but we also do have an extensive outage program here at Southern Nevada Water Authority where we have six months out of the year, we will do outages to inspect some more of our critical pipelines,” said Augustine.

Augustine also shared why all of this is important to our water supply.

“Water conservation,” said Augustine. “We are able to do these inspections while reservoirs are full of water while the pipelines are full of water. It decreases the amount of water we have to discharge to the street in order to get access to these facilities and at the end of the day we do it to provide a safe and reliable water system.”

The Las Vegas Valley Water District has approximately 42 facilities within the valley that store water which quates to over 900 million gallons of storage.

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