Mobotix, a manufacturer of HD IP video systems has announced its partner SeSys, a specialist in network vision solutions, has been selected by Southern Water to deploy a surveillance solution to provide additional visual verification for its drinking water sampling procedures at up to 100 sites across the south of the U.K.
Mobotix, a manufacturer of HD IP video systems has announced its partner SeSys, a specialist in network vision solutions, has been selected by Southern Water to deploy a surveillance solution to provide additional visual verification for its drinking water sampling procedures at up to 100 sites across the south of the U.K.
Southern Water supplies fresh, quality drinking water to households across Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The company inspects the quality of its drinking water every week at locations across its regions via a manual sampling process that includes a critical sequence of actions to ensure that the sample reaches the highest standards. To ensure that the samples are properly carried out and verifiable, Southern Water began a project to install a HD digital surveillance system which alerts its main control center when a water supply site is visited, records the entire sampling process and archives the footage for a minimum time period in line with Data Protection requirements.
Following a framework-based tender, Southern Water selected a solution from SeSys which included a Mobotix camera. SeSys are a specialist in digital and networked video who has worked with major utility providers including Yorkshire Water, Northern Ireland Water and Scottish Water for several years. The firm is well known within the industry for innovative, bespoke projects – especially within challenging outdoor, subterranean and hazardous-chemical environments.
“The solution from SeSys was run at a pilot site for a number of weeks and proved reliability with good image quality while the built-in record-to-flash capability allows us to deploy only a minimal amount of equipment on each site,” said Paul Leverett, Telemetry Projects Team Manager for Southern Water, “The cameras only start recording when somebody enters a water sampling kiosk and this activity also sends an alert to our control center near Worthing, which allows a technician to simultaneously monitor the process in real time.”
The new Southern Water visual assurance system goes beyond the drinking water quality inspectorate guidelines and is part of an ongoing commitment by Southern Water to ensure safe and clean water supply to more than one million households across southern England. Each day, the company supplies 555 million liters of drinking water from 90 water treatment works along more than 13,600 kilometers of water mains to customers' taps.
“The system has been installed in around half of all our water supply sites and will be fully operational by June” Leverett said.
Each site uses Mobotix cameras to provide a 360-degree all-round view able to capture an entire sample collection area and locally store the video footage. Each camera is also connected by either ADSL or MPLS to allow the Southern Water control center to view each sample collection process and to archive video footage if required.
“The project with Southern Water is an example of surveillance as a health and safety asset and cost saver,” said Dan Eames, Technical and Projects Manager, “Water sampling is vitally important to Southern Water and must be 100-percent reliable. With visual verification, Southern Water can confirm when and how the sample collection was conducted, providing a valuable audit record and the opportunity to reinforce good practice and training.”