It isn’t easy maintaining over 250 miles of gravity-fed canals and laterals, but the Turlock Irrigation District refuses to shy away from assisting nearly 5,000 customers or their assets. Instead, they are creating an easier method for irrigation customers to pose concerns, ask questions, or view their current regulations.
In an effort to offer better communicative services with its customers, TID has launched a new irrigation water user information website. The site officially launched earlier this week and was discussed at length by the Water Distribution Department Manager Mike Kavarian during TID’s weekly board meeting.
“We’ve talked with the board over the last couple of years about getting water use information online,” said Kavarian. “We now have a site that provides water use information for the customer, for the public right now.”
Parcel owners and local water users under the Turlock Irrigation District no longer need to call the help desk to figure out their water storage. The website will allow a greater convenience for both customers and employees of the call center in minimizing call traffic.
The water usage website can be found at https://waterrequest.tid.org/
All the customer needs to provide is a login username and password to add parcels to the database system. Once the parcel has been selected, TID will update the account based on the individual's water usage.
“They can look at their irrigation history for the current year, how many acre-feet they have left, and how many hours they have left under each tier,” said Kavarian. “We currently have 13 years of data on the website, and will show the last receipt that we have identified. It is the same information they would get when they call the call center.”
Kavarian highlighted that one of the perks of having a website is its accessibility. The website is designed to ensure access at any time, and does not function under time constraints or regular business hours.
“We felt that it was a given opportunity for people to check their information at any time,” said Kavarian.
A couple years ago, TID had offered an online water system that garnered more problems than solutions. It was the hope to learn from the prior mistake, and generate a website that would follow the footsteps of the power outage website database.
“When we tried the online water system, it didn’t work the way we anticipated it would. So we piggybacked on that idea, and cleaned it up,” said Kavarian. “Though we do not have an online watering system right now, we do have the water user information website. But during this type of year, in reality, it is what I would rather have implemented as of right now. The system works really well, and I give kudos to [information technology department]. They did a really great job getting that online and getting that information out to the customers.”
