City leaders looking to improve Fort Myers infrastructure with AI

When people think of artificial intelligence (AI), they typically think of online apps like Chat GPT but the City of Fort Myers wants to use it to make a real-world difference.

In a city surrounded by water, there are three dreaded words homeowners in Southwest Florida hate to hear: boil water notice.

“The rule says when a distribution system goes below 20 PSI portions of that system you issue a boil water notice,” said Richard Moulton, Utilities Director for the City of Fort Myers.

Fort Myers boil water notices have led to neighbors reaching their boiling point.

“It just means we can’t do anything. We still can’t drink the water or use it. It’s completely out of sync,” said Meghan Yerian.

Now, the city is turning to a surprising source to get back in sync, so you don’t have to worry about boiling the water coming out of your sink.

“It’s really amazing what the technology can do,” said Jason Sciandra, Assistant Director of the Public Utilities Department for Fort Myers. “We’re being charged with doing more with less, and we’ve heard that for over a decade now, but in our eyes, AI can help us do that.”

“What we’re trying to do is get to a point where, using the technology that’s out there, using sensors in the water distribution system, be able to predict them, potentially and ultimately, get to the point of predicting, ‘Hey, we think we’re gonna have a break in this part of town,’ and either being ready for it or to being able to proactively fix something, or if we do have a break, being able to identify it faster,” said Sciandra.

Therefore, not only will the amount of time a boil water notice is in effect lessen, but also the number of people who hear those dreaded words will drop from thousands to hundreds or less.

“Typically, we’re very conservative when we do a broad-brush approach to identifying who gets a boil water notice,” said Sciandra. “By using this technology, we could look at all of the customers in our system or a portion of the customers in our system where we think the breaks happened, and we could then send out notices to just those people who were affected. So much more targeted boil water notice versus this broad stroke that we have to do today for safety purposes.”

That’s not the only benefit of artificial intelligence.

We’ve seen the impacts of back-ups in manholes and the damage they can leave behind. Now there’s a fix for that, too, resulting in less of a mess.

“One of the things that we’re going to be investing in is putting in what are called smart cover sensors. It’s like a level sensor that gets put into the manhole, and that level sensor will track that water level, and as that water level comes up, it will give us a notification that ‘Hey, this is starting to come up,'” said Sciandra.