Accelerating Water Infrastructure Improvements

I spend a lot of time blogging about emergency preparedness in the electric utility industry, but water system operators face their own set of unique challenges.  One of which is the fact that many urban neighborhoods throughout the country suffer from extreme flooding during storms. Generally speaking, the water infrastructure in these areas was designed for a smaller population than what exists today.  And this regular flooding exacerbates the already difficult process of emergency or outage restoration.

Roadmap to Water Infrastructure Improvements

The Climate Resilient & Equitable Water Systems Capital Scan, authored by Mission Point Partners and California Environmental Associates and commissioned by The Kresge Foundation, was created to identify solutions to the flooding that regularly occurs in certain neighborhoods.

The ‘scan’ looked at 6 categories of water infrastructure integrity: green infrastructure, planning and preparedness, water monitoring, energy efficiency, water efficiency, and distributed treatment and supply.  To learn more about the scan and its findings, click here.

In my opinion, this initiative has been a long time coming.  As I said, when certain neighborhoods get flooded over and over again, it makes the local utilities’ recovery efforts that much more difficult.  It also promotes degradation of materials, illness, and economic blight.  In terms of restoration, the process cannot typically even start until the flooding has subsided, because crews cannot get around.

Hopefully, this is the start of a long-term process to fix these neighborhoods once and for all. We’ll see…