More than a decade ago, in the small town of Walkerton, Ontar-io, seven people died and more than 2,500 fell ill. The culprit? Farm runoff contaminated with E. coli had been captured by the water wells that provided the town’s drinking water supply. A public outcry prompted revamped water legislation across the country.

Since then, the province of Ontario has transformed its reputation for water management. Recently, it was recognized by national environmental watchdog Ecojustice for “implementing the most ambitious source water protection program in Canada and [having] some of the country’s stron-gest treatment, testing, operator train-ing and public reporting standards.”

Building on the world-leading research in water being conducted by Ontario universities, Ontario companies are rapidly becoming leaders in water services and technologies, recognizing the potential to create economic growth in the water sector and promote better conservation and management of water resources. One of these initiatives is the Southern Ontario Water Consortium (SOWC), which is spearheading a new way of incor-porating innovative technology and understanding into the management and treatment of water across an entire watershed.

A collaborative team involving more than 70 private sector users and testers, five municipalities and eight universities — with substantial financial support from the government of Canada, the Province of Ontario and IBM — is constructing a $52.8 million integrated platform for the development of new water technologies in Southern Ontario.

Dr. Jim Barker and Dr. Dave Rudolph, both of the University of Waterloo, are two of the project leads for the consortium.

When IBM stepped in with a $20 million in-kind contribution, it was matched by $19.5 million from the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, along with a $9 million grant from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation. “IBM’s contribution helped us shape what became the SOWC — a much bigger, richer program,” Dr. Rudolph says.

The platform will provide living labs for Southern Ontario’s industry to develop, test and demonstrate new water technologies and processes for local, national, and global markets, in collabora-tion with university and government.

“We are taking steps to turn around the degradation of our water resource,” Dr. Rudolph says. “In these living laboratories, we hope to immediately transfer what we learn to other jurisdictions and locations so we can start building a sustainable water strategy to pass to the next generation.”

He continues, “The whole world is trying to achieve integration of surface and ground water and how we treat it. All members of the consortium are experts in different areas, working together to understand how water is managed in an urbanizing, growing watershed. It will be a game-changing project.”

The collaborative R&D effort already underway among universities and companies can now take a giant leap forward, thanks to an integrated platform across all elements of water management, enabled by a sophisticated data generation, processing, and management environment.

The platform will enable the develop-ment of technologies and services in water and in the collection, manage-ment, and reuse of data in an integrated, intelligent, instrumented wa tershed. These new water technologies will meet the needs of potential markets around the world. The intelligent use of data from the instrumentation in the platform will position consortium participants as world leaders in the services and tech-nologies required for natural resource and environment management.

“Ultimately, an entire watershed will be instrumented,” Dr. Rudolph says. “Many different groups want to use the resulting data for multiple purposes, ranging from land management, water conservation, public health and safety, to economic development.”

SIX THEMES FOR THE SOWCThe platform will be organized for purposes of development, installation, and operations and testing around six themes:

Watersheds — overall management of a com-plete watershed includ-ing groundwater and all forms of run-off into the watershed.

Wastewater— new technologies for the effective treatment of wastewater making reuse possible.

Ecotoxicology — the detection of new and emerging contaminants in the water supply.

Drinking water— new technologies for water treatment also allied to making reuse possible.

Sensors — development of sensors to make watersheds, including both streams and groundwater, more intelligent, instrumented and integrated.

Analytical — new data collection, analysis, processing, manage-ment and dissemination technologies including middleware and software.

THIRSTY FOR CHANGE IN SOUTHERN

ONTARIO

Theproposedplatformiscomprisedoffourcomplementaryelements:

1. Drinking and waste water technologies that enable more effective use and reuse of water as well as substantially reducing the negative impact on both the quantity and quality of water through human use.

2. Contaminated ground water and soil remediation technologies that restore sites that constitute a threat to water purity.

3. New sensor and analytical techniques/ technologies to make watersheds, including both streams and ground water, more intelligent, instrumented, and integrated. Emerging contaminants will be tracked.

4. The development of new software and middleware to make optimal use of the data generated.

Significant development opportunities for technologies and services in water markets around the world await.

“Designing these products is a huge, exciting opportunity for Canadian industry,” Dr. Rudolph notes. “The platform will help us determine what water infrastructure needs to be replaced, how treatment plants should be changed, and what our technology should be.”

Currently, the consortium is constructing the platform through the acquisition of equipment and instruments, with IBM helping to determine how the data will be transmitted and streamed. By March 2014, the platform will be operational with six “nodes” or theme areas of focus (see sidebar), including drinking water, watersheds, wastewater, and ecotoxicology. The data handling environment from IBM ensures that insights from each area are available to all authorized users.

“We will provide IBM with the emerging smart data coming out of the field, and their skills in analytics will play an important role in analyzing the huge amount of data generated,” Dr. Rudolph says. “The platform provides an intelligent, fully instrumented watershed to develop the data environment appropriate for modern water management.”

With the SOWC, Canada is on the fast track to becoming a leader in water technology management and sustainability. “This facility will be unique in the world and train future leaders who will be dealing with tough problems,” Dr. Rudolph says. “Society needs the right people to preserve the water resource for future generations, and they might as well be coming from Canada — creating new, better jobs for Canadians.”

www.sowc.ca

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