Corpus Christi taps Northrop Grumman for wireless public works

Employees in Corpus Christi, Texas, no longer will have to go door to door each month to read water meters by hand, thanks to a new automated meter reading system.

Northrop Grumman Corp. won a $23 million contract with Corpus Christi to install a citywide, wireless broadband infrastructure and an automated meter-reading system, designed to cover the city for government and public access.

Northrop Grumman's Information Technology division of McLean, Va., will design and install the system that will give Corpus Christi public safety officials access to emergency management services, including sending and receiving live video in the field.

One of the first applications of the new system will be to support the automated water-meter-reading system, which collects meter data daily over the wireless network and provides it to the city's customer information and billing system.

The automated system removes the need for field personnel to read individually each meter once a month. The efficiency gained by the new system should make for significant savings to the city, Northrop Grumman said in a statement.


As part of the project, Northrop Grumman will exchange about half of the city's 150,000 water and gas meters with automated meters and retrofit the remaining meters with the automated technology.

Northrop Grumman also will conduct a network and information technology study for the city to ensure its capability to support the wireless broadband system and future applications.

Northrop Grumman's teammates on the project include Hexagram Inc., Cleveland, National Metering Services Inc., Kearny, N.J., and Tropos Networks Inc., Sunnyvale, Calif.

Northrop Grumman IT is a division of Northrop Grumman Corp., Los Angeles. Northrop Grumman, which has about 125,000 employees and had annual revenue of $29.9 billion in fiscal 2004, ranks No. 2 on Washington Technology's 2005 Top 100 list of federal prime contractors.