Asset Management With Drones: American Water’s UAV Program
One of American Water’s drones, with a safety helmet included for scale.
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Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you ended up in your current position.
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Chris Kahn: I have an undergraduate degree in geography from Rutgers. I was an intern and then an employee with the Middlesex County, New Jersey, engineering department as a GIS analyst during college. After graduation, I worked for a couple of years for a car navigation company now named TomTom. This was before Google Maps—turnby-turn navigation was not yet common and the data were often flawed. I got to travel around a lot, making the maps better and seeing the country. Eventually, I earned a master’s degree in GIS, which is like the information technology branch of geography. GIS is what makes spatial analysis and location analytics possible. For about 4 years, I consulted for a company that built GIS databases for the City of Philadelphia. In January 2008, I started with New Jersey American Water, which had just begun its GIS program. My roles have changed over the years. As far as titles, I started as a senior technician and then became a project manager, a senior project manager, and a manager, and I am now a senior manager leading a new department named Geospatial Operational Services. Ultimately, I moved from New
PHOTO COURTESY OF AMERICAN WATER.
sset management requires precise information about the location and condition of an organization’s assets, as well as the ability to regularly inspect them and update that information. American Water is one company that has started to use drones to do this. American Water’s drones are not only used as eyes in the sky to inspect specific problems in hard-to-reach locations like elevated water storage tanks, but the information they collect is integrated into the company’s internal mapping and geographic information systems (GIS) software. Further, with specialized thermal imaging and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) sensors, American Water’s drones can locate buried assets and rapidly identify damaged solar panels, among other tasks. In this interview, Chris Kahn, American Water’s senior GIS manager, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-inChief Kris Polly about the advantages of the company’s drone system and his advice for other agencies interested in establishing a similar program.
