System resilience is vital for water, wastewater, and stormwater utilities. A resilient system will take upsets without emergency and will get back online quickly in the event of disasters. We incorporate resilience in our design and implementation work, but our work with resilience assessment came into focus with Emergency Response Planning for water systems to comply with the 2018 America’s Water Infrastructure Act. Our successful resilience development process is based on three elements:
Focus on asset-level analysis to demonstrate the greatest gains.
Use engineering design and system experience to zero in on critical elements and their protection.
Customize analysis with community impacts to make sound decisions. (Federal regional population and industry data provide the basis for economic impacts of water, wastewater, and stormwater emergencies. Community impacts can easily be more than 10,000 x the impacts on water utilities!)
Chris Ewers has conducted classes around California on assessing and improving system resilience in water and wastewater systems. Contact us to discuss how to improve system resilience assessment effectively and practically.
