The City of Pearland, Texas, 25 miles from Houston, is a microcosm of the trials of wastewater infrastructure management. Old Town Pearland dates to the 1930s and 1940s, and waves of population since then have created a jumble of sanitary sewers, old and new, leaky and tight. Recently, the city has added hundreds of new connections a month to its system of five wastewater treatment plants, 78 lift stations, and 12 water stations. Until recent years, operators tracked most of these facilities manually, writing field log books from which supervisors transcribed data into the computer. The city now gathers that
