Episodes

After years of collecting and organizing data, the water sector appears to be reaching a turning point: AI is helping utilities put that information to work proactively. In this episode, Seth Nickinson, Director of Product at SewerAI, brings the perspective of a software developer responding to what utilities need from AI—and what still makes them cautious. He sees adoption accelerating as people bring experience with tools like ChatGPT into the workplace, along with firsthand knowledge of the...

Saving water is one challenge; finding the money to build conservation projects is another. The fourth episode of Resilience In The Rockies examines how Colorado communities are assembling federal, state, local, and private funding to turn water-efficiency ideas into infrastructure, with WaterNow helping local partners identify opportunities, navigate complex grant programs, and strengthen applications. Along the Rio Grande near Del Norte, partners combined a $1.2 million Bureau of Reclamation...

Colorado communities are treating public engagement as water infrastructure, using trusted messengers, targeted outreach, and practical programs to turn conservation strategies into action. The third episode of Resilience in the Rockies examines how Summit County, Boulder, and Aurora are reaching people who can determine whether water-saving programs actually work, plus how technical assistance from WaterNow enables the programs. In Summit County, High Country Conservation Center helps connect...

Indoor residential water use in American homes has fallen 44 percent over three decades, as more efficient fixtures and appliances allow people to perform the same daily tasks with far less water. Peter Mayer, principal engineer at WaterDM and lead author of all three Residential End Uses of Water studies, explains the findings from the Water Research Foundation’s 2026 update. The study draws on billing records from 52 utilities across the United States and Canada, along with high-resolution d...

Policy is becoming a water-supply tool in Colorado, as local governments use development codes, financing rules, and workforce requirements to reduce demand. The second episode of Resilience in the Rockies examines how Broomfield, Denver Water, and Aspen are using governance to move conservation projects forward. In Broomfield, where landscape irrigation accounted for an estimated 60 to 70 percent of annual water demand, a 2023 ordinance limits turf to 30 percent of new landscapes and caps out...

Bringing research, prototyping, production, and shipping under one roof can turn American manufacturing into a faster engine for water innovation. Rob Gledhill, CEO of Blue-White Industries, offers an inside look at how the Huntington Beach company develops and manufactures equipment used in water and wastewater treatment. Blue-White produces chemical metering pumps, flow meters, instrumentation, and complete chemical-feed systems for drinking water, industrial processes, and wastewater facili...

Milwaukee’s water technology economy traces back roughly 150 years to breweries, tanneries, and meatpacking plants that created sustained demand for pumps, valves, meters, and pipes. In this episode, Karen Frost, executive director of The Water Council, explains how that industrial history continues to shape the city’s leading role in developing and scaling water technology. Water-intensive industries created demand for specialized equipment, and over time southeastern Wisconsin developed a de...

Colorado communities adapting to the long-term strain on water supplies in the arid West are turning one of their largest demands—the irrigated landscape—into a source of new supply, with this year’s historically low snowpack adding urgency to the work. The first episode of Resilience in the Rockies travels from the Front Range to the Western Slope to examine how local leaders, utility managers, landscape professionals, and residents are replacing thirsty turf with landscapes designed for Color...

A dozen years after the Flint water crisis galvanized national action on lead pipes, the United States has moved from scattered voluntary replacement efforts to a federal mandate to remove nearly all lead service lines by 2037. Roya Alkafaji of the Environmental Defense Fund and Mason Hines of RESOLVE are members of the Lead Service Line Replacement Collaborative, a coalition of 28 national organizations formed in 2016 to accelerate replacement and share lessons from communities doing the work....

Water utilities may never escape the need to triage infrastructure, but better data, design, and monitoring can reduce the constant churn of reactive responses. In this episode, Jeff Bridge, Charis Klimas, and Brett Braganz of Oldcastle Infrastructure examine how utilities can move upstream of failure by choosing materials for the actual application, designing around workforce constraints, and verifying underground problems before committing crews and capital. Bridge connects conveyance effici...

Digital systems, increasingly strengthened by artificial intelligence, are helping water utilities move from reacting to failures toward anticipating where infrastructure problems are most likely to occur. Joshua Cantone of SUEZ explains how that shift is changing decisions about pipes, pumps, wells, treatment plants, and long-term capital investment. Many utilities already collect large amounts of information through control systems, maintenance records, hydraulic models, and asset-management...

Water utilities are rich in data but often struggle to turn decades of information into decisions that improve daily operations. In this episode, Travis Wagner of Trinnex explains how utilities can connect fragmented information, preserve workforce knowledge, and introduce artificial intelligence without sacrificing accuracy or security. Most utilities already collect extensive records through plant-control systems known as SCADA, geographic information systems, maintenance programs, and finan...

PFAS regulation now has more moving parts, deadlines, and compliance pathways than ever, but the bottom-line advice for water utilities is simple: keep moving. In this episode, Amanda Canida of Black & Veatch explains how utilities can navigate the regulatory complexity while advancing the treatment projects needed to meet federal drinking water standards. Federal monitoring data indicates that roughly 10 percent of public water systems could be affected by the four-parts-per-trillion limits f...

Advanced water treatment is entering a new era. Utilities are moving beyond conventional treatment to tackle PFAS, expand water reuse, and secure new water supplies. That often means using technologies like membranes, ozone, activated carbon, and advanced filtration. Jaime Safulko of PCL Construction explains what\'s driving this wave of investment and why these projects are more complex than the treatment plants of the past. She shares lessons from the El Paso Pure Water Project, which is exp...

Advanced water treatment is entering a new era. Utilities are moving beyond conventional treatment to tackle PFAS, expand water reuse, and secure new water supplies. That often means using technologies like membranes, ozone, activated carbon, and advanced filtration. Jaime Safulko of PCL Construction explains what's driving this wave of investment and why these projects are more complex than the treatment plants of the past. She shares lessons from the El Paso Pure Water Project, which is expe...

Water has become one of the biggest blind spots in corporate sustainability reporting, with companies measuring and disclosing water use in vastly different ways. In this episode, Lauren Enright of SCS Global Services and Alexis Morgan of World Wildlife Fund discuss the effort to create Water Scopes 1, 2, and 3—a new framework designed to bring consistency, transparency, and accountability to how organizations understand and report water impacts across their operations, energy use, and supply c...

Loudoun County, Virginia is known as Data Center Alley, the longtime epicenter of the data center industry and home to one of the world's largest concentrations of digital infrastructure. As communities across the country debate the impact of data centers on water resources, Loudoun Water offers a rare look at what happens when a utility has decades of experience planning for and serving the industry. The episode features conversations with utility leaders Brian Carnes, Alton Echols, and Mark ...

The impact of data centers is currently one of the most discussed issues in water. In this episode, Will Hewes, Water Sustainability Lead for Amazon, shares how one of the world's largest data center operators is managing water use, responding to growing public scrutiny, and working to reduce its impact on local water resources. Hewes discusses Amazon's newly released water report, which details company-wide water use, reports a 52% improvement in water efficiency over four years, and shows pro...

A landmark new report from the American Water Works Association estimates the United States will need between $2.1 and $2.4 trillion in drinking water infrastructure investment over the next 25 years—and the funding gap is widening fast. In this episode, the findings of Beyond The Replacement Era are explained by Mike Grimm of West Slope Water District, Heather Collins of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, Janet Clements of One Water Econ, John Mastracchio of Raftelis, and ...

The rivers of Washington, D.C. are becoming living laboratories for the future of urban water stewardship, with Xylem and the Reservoir Center helping launch a new real-time water quality monitoring network across the Potomac, Anacostia, and Shenandoah rivers. In this episode, guests Nicole Horvath of the Reservoir Center, Trey Sherard of Anacostia Riverkeeper, Olympic rower Aquil Abdullah, and Lynn Coffey of Living Classrooms discuss how technology, recreation, education, and environmental res...

America’s drinking water infrastructure depends on more than 2 million miles of pipe buried beneath streets and communities across the country. In this episode of How Water Works, Jeff Mason leads a tour inside the U.S. Pipe foundry in Alabama to show how ductile iron pipe is manufactured — from recycled scrap metal to critical underground infrastructure. The episode follows the intense process of melting old cars, appliances, and industrial metal into pipe engineered to last for generations an...

Water utilities are quietly strengthening the “immune system” of our water infrastructure, using compliance programs and technology to prevent pollution, protect drinking water, and reduce sewer overflows before they happen. In this episode, Mick O’Dwyer of SwiftComply shares how his journey from wastewater engineer in Dublin to tech founder led to building software that modernizes programs for backflow, pretreatment, and FOG (fats, oils, and grease). He explains how outdated, paper-heavy syst...

More than 2 million people in the United States live without running water or a working toilet—and the true number could be far higher. It’s a crisis hidden in plain sight, affecting communities from tribal lands and rural Appalachia to border colonias and even neighborhoods just beyond city infrastructure. In this episode, Kabir Thatte of the Vessel Collective announces a new national roadmap aimed at closing that gap. Thatte outlines the scale of the issue—families hauling water, unreliable ...

Nanobubbles—microscopic pockets of gas invisible to the human eye—are emerging as a powerful tool to improve water treatment and management. In this episode of How Water Works, Travis Loop visits Moleaer Inc. in Los Angeles to break down how nanobubbles work and why they’re gaining traction across industries. Thousands of times smaller than a grain of salt, nanobubbles don’t rise and burst like ordinary bubbles—they remain suspended for months, increasing dissolved oxygen and enhancing biologi...