Bachelor Controls and the City of Sabetha replaced an aging SCADA and Historian stack with an EdgeLake fabric — water, wastewater, and power monitoring, deployed in days.
The City of Sabetha, Kansas (in the northeastern corner of the state, with a local economy driven by manufacturing and agriculture) replaced an aging SCADA and historian stack across water, wastewater, and power utilities with a decentralized EdgeLake deployment. Bachelor Controls, the systems integrator working with the city, orchestrated the rollout in partnership with the LF Edge community.
The trigger was a stack of failures: a communications outage that briefly cut the town's water supply, a costly chemical-delivery mishap at the wastewater plant, and expensive blower replacements that can each run into the tens of thousands of dollars. Aging technology, a smaller and less experienced workforce, and multiple hats per operator made the standard Human Machine Interface model insufficient. Sabetha needed alerts that found the right person in real time, not screens waiting to be checked.
EdgeLake runs on Lenovo ThinkEdge SE 30 industrial PCs deployed at each plant, with each node hosting a containerized operator alongside its data sources. A no-code rule engine handles SMS alerting via Twilio for time-critical conditions. A unified data lake lets the city query plant telemetry over plain SQL rather than navigating per-device tag lists. Data stays on premise, with the cloud used only for high availability and redundancy at storage prices.
The architectural detail Sabetha cares about is custody. The city retains full control of its data, the EdgeLake nodes keep operating when cloud connectivity is lost, and the blockchain-policy layer means configuration is a single source of truth across nodes. Disaster recovery and operational continuity are properties of the architecture, not a separate vendor product.