Case Study: City West Water improves pipe inspection data quality with VAPAR

Seeking to standardise their CCTV data to streamline decision making, City West Water have taken an innovative approach to optimise their asset planning

City West Water, one of three major water utilities serving the Melbourne metropolitan area, manages more than 4,000 km of sewer pipes and regularly inspects hundreds of kilometres of CCTV footage each year. Its challenge was that manual condition grading was time-consuming and inconsistent, making it harder to standardize inspection data and use it effectively for planning, forecasting, and maintenance decisions.

VAPAR provided an AI-powered cloud platform for automated CCTV review and condition assessment, and City West Water ran a fully remote pilot on 235 CCTV files covering about 14 km of pipe. The pilot identified nearly 5,000 pipe features with comparable accuracy to traditional inspection for main defect identification, and City West Water verified VAPAR as a way to standardize condition scores and improve data quality for asset management.

City West Water

Jack Cunnington

Asset Management Engineer – Service Planning