Pump stations provide water supply and dispatching functions in industry plants. Smart and sustainable operations of the pump stations plays a critical role for production safety and efficiency. This requires the real-time states of the pump stations to be tracked for situation awareness. However, the pump stations contain serial/ parallel pumps, pipes, valves, and other devices, whose states are tightly coupled due to the hydrodynamics of the fluid. This paper reports the design, development, and knowledge learned from practical deployment of an Internet of Things (IOT) system in Baotou steel plant, China. We spent more than half a year to deploy a IOT system containing several hundreds of sensor nodes. The IOT system is designed to provide healthy and sustainability information of pump stations in three levels: 1) pump level; 2) pump station level, and 3) system level. The IOT system helps to discover originally unaware problems of the pump stations, and shows potential directions of using IOT and Big data analysis for smart pump station operations.