Michael Bachelor's full Sabetha talk. How the city replaced an aging SCADA stack with EdgeLake to modernize water, wastewater, and power monitoring, run by a smaller team.
Michael Bachelor, who lives in Sabetha, Kansas and runs the integration work as an industrial digital-transformation architect with nearly 30 years of control-systems experience, walks through how the city ended up on EdgeLake to modernize its power, water, and wastewater utilities.
The trigger was a near-miss. An aging network switch failed at the plant, the HMI screen sat stagnant without alerting, and a less-experienced operator did not catch it on the rounds. The clearwell that supplies the town's water came close to going dry. If a fire had broken out that day, the firemen would not have had water pressure. That kind of incident, layered on top of the city's aging workforce taking institutional plant knowledge into retirement, is what put EdgeLake on the table.
The deployed stack is small on purpose. Three sites, a handful of nodes per site, with Open Horizon (the LF Edge project for managing applications at scale) ready to deploy more when needed. EdgeLake's rule engine handles real-time alerts, though the city is intentionally conservative about alarming so the wiring exists but is throttled to avoid nuisance alerts. A PDF report writer handles the relational, batch-style reports the city still owes the state every month, for things like water chemistry or power usage.
The architectural piece Bachelor emphasized is that all of the logic, including node configuration itself, lives as policies on the blockchain layer (a master node, in the no-public-chain version). That gives Sabetha a single source of truth for how the data should be represented, how each node should be configured, and what gets exposed to whom. Operators do not SSH into edge boxes. They assign a policy number, and EdgeLake takes care of the rest.