ARCADIS provided a turnkey GIS project for Duke Water (a business unit of Duke Energy) located in Anderson County, South Carolina. Duke contracted ARCADIS in November 1998 to build a complete, accurately referenced GIS of the Duke water distribution system. This project's scope of services included conversion of Duke's CAD drawings, engineering plans, old paper grid maps, and hydrant details. These features were all transformed into a fully operational and comprehensive GIS. Prior to implementing a GIS, the District's mapping system consisted of various unreferenced CAD drawings, unorganized sets of aging engineering plans, various as-built drawings, hand sketched hydrant detail drawings, and a series of 30 x 30 inch paper system maps, each having varying degrees of completeness and scale. Many of the plans were already beyond the stage where scanning or reproduction was feasible. The remaining plans had a foreseeable life of only a few years before they would have needed to be completely redrawn or copied at significant cost.

Duke Water recognized that this highly valuable information was only accessible to a few employees involved in its engineering operations. In order to make this valuable water system information available to the entire staff, and take advantage of new mapping technology, pertinent files and information were gathered, organized, assembled, and converted into spatially correct geographic information.

The GIS system incorporates a functional and networked system of topologically correct valves, hydrants, fittings, and pipes. Duke Water currently houses and maintains over 320 miles of their water distribution system in the GIS.

Accurate locations of over 7,500 fittings were established, including 678 fire hydrants. Of the fire hydrants located, 550 were linked to existing tables showing detailed results of previous flow tests. Final conversion required Duke's engineering staff review of the system.

During the conversion process, ARCADIS provided, to Duke's personnel, comprehensive system training, and certified ESRI training for maintenance and system updating of the water distribution features.

Delivery, installation, and testing of the final GIS occurred during November, 1999 and Duke Water has asked ARCADIS to provide additional GIS services for further training of their staff, and development of custom applications that will bring the GIS and current mapping technology into its operations, and maintenance and customer service areas.