Mountaineer Gas Company Improves Leak Management with ArcGIS

Mountaineer Gas Company delivers natural gas to approximately 220,000 customers in 50 of the 55 West Virginia counties through a pipe network over 6,000 miles long. The inefficiencies, lack of accuracy, and productivity concerns in the utility’s leak management process presented challenges to achieving business and regulatory goals. Mountaineer Gas decided to create a new leak management process that leveraged the capabilities of its ArcGIS Enterprise architecture. The new process has improved efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. Mountaineer Gas now has authoritative gas leak location information that can be used for collaboration, communication, and timely action.

For years, Mountaineer Gas’s leak management process required staff to work from paper forms and desktop geographic information system (GIS) applications. This made compliance, tracking, and scheduling of data harder to track. Accuracy was challenging because mobile workers located leaks using a street address or low-accuracy GPS coordinates. Data captured on paper in the field needed to be reentered into ArcMap back in the office. Time inefficiencies resulted from surveyors needing to plan in-office days to complete their data entry. 

For leak clearing, leak reinspect, and leak follow-up processes, users had to monitor compliance reports to schedule necessary work, primarily work on paper, and manually enter results back into ArcMap. Overall, the legacy process resulted in inefficiencies, inaccuracies, and productivity issues.

Mountaineer Gas implemented a modernized leak management solution enabled by ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123, ArcGIS Workforce, and ArcGIS Dashboards. The modernized process enables an end-to-end full life cycle workflow that allows for leak survey planning, execution, and reporting, as well as gas leak identification, inspection, and resolution.

“The new leakage system has made a positive impact on convenience, efficiency, and accuracy for us field employees that use it to perform our survey work,” said Timothy “Keith” Withrow, leakage inspector, Beckley Service Center (field office) at Mountaineer Gas Company.

The new process allows for safe activities within the Mountaineer Gas service territory, and Mountaineer Gas Company was able to implement this modernized process in one year.

“It has streamlined the leakage program to quickly and conveniently be worked solely on a mobile device in the field with no printing of maps or taking time to physically write up leaks on paper,” continued Withrow. “Customer service line leak survey reporting has been simplified and made more efficient as has the patrolling program which are both now completed in the field on mobile devices. All of these are now done without any paperwork and allow for real-time updates to maps.”

After one year in production, Mountaineer Gas noted that surveyors no longer use desktop computers to collect data, maintain route progress, or schedule work. ArcGIS Field Maps, ArcGIS Survey123, and ArcGIS Workforce are used for all staff work in the field, enabling the entering of homogeneous data, including picture attachments, all the way through the leak-clearing process.