Watershed and Treatment Plants

Our GIS team has worked for our water quality division, which is charged with protecting our watershed by mapping an oil pipeline that runs north of Lake Maumelle, our primary source lake, and mapping the Ouachita National Recreation Trail that ends in our watershed.

We also partnered with the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission to create a Wildlife Management Area and hunting zones, limited access areas, and forest management areas for when CAW conducts prescribed forest burns and thinning to improve water quality.

Watershed protection manager Raven Lawson said, "Our GIS capabilities allow us to do so much more than simply look at layers and static features on maps. Between our two watersheds (Lake Maumelle and Lake Winona), we are responsible for keeping an eye on over 115,000 acres; that's a lot to do from the ground.

"We use the GIS information we have to assess the watershed landscape and make major conservation and management decisions. When we are looking to purchase property or preparing for planting forest and prairie landscapes, we look at GIS data to determine development potential and conservation value of properties. We also study historic and nearby species compositions to restore landscapes to more closely match what should be there and increase our potential for successful projects. We can also visualize how and where water will flow across the landscape and determine what along those paths could be potential issues for the water quality in our reservoirs. Having this technology and information is critical to our natural resource management activities," she said.

It's not only our underground assets and land that has been mapped in GIS. We have even mapped all our facilities and set up relational databases for materials and vertical assets inside the structures.

Our Jack Wilson Water Treatment Plant, for example, is mapped so that technicians can click on an area and see every switch and all electronic equipment or parts in that section. Maintenance crews use this to create work orders on our pumps. They can see the type of pump, the brand, and the specific parts. This was a six-month project completed in 2008-2009 and is continually updated as new equipment is added.