Protect water supply and wastewater treatment facilities to reduce physical damage and sustain their function during extreme weather events.
Best Practice of this action
Rating Guideline
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Use the CREAT risk assessment (or the like) to help understand and adapt to extreme weather; take into account infrastructure stressors (such as age), updated precipitation data (Atlas 14), and climate change trends or projections. |
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Implement low-cost strategies to reduce climate change risk and increase resilience for operations or a specific asset (such as a lift station, headwork, water intake/distribution/storage, booster stations/pump, or treatment plant). |
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Invest in medium to high-cost strategies that reduce climate change risk and increase resilience for operations or a specific asset. |
Resources
- EPA's Climate Ready Water Utilities (CRWU) initiative provides water utility managers with tools, training, and technical assistance needed to adapt to climate changes. Included is a link to CREAT - a risk-assessment tool which allows utility managers to do location-specific 2035 and 2060 projections of annual total precipitation, annual average temperature, precipitation intensity for the 100-year storm, and number of days per year with temperatures above 100ºF.
- See how the City of Faribault, one of 20 participants nationwide selected in 2015, used the Climate Resilience Evaluation and Awareness Tool (CREAT) to assess the city’s infrastructure after 2010 and 2014 flooding events.
- The Federal Energy Management Program’s Technical Resilience Navigator (TRN) helps organizations manage the risk to critical missions from disruptions in energy and water services. It provides a systematic approach to identifying energy and water resiliency gaps and developing and prioritizing solutions that reduce risk. The TRN enables organizations to be proactive in identifying and addressing vulnerabilities to their critical energy and water systems to reduce outage impacts, and support continuous mission operations.
- The Infrastructure Stress Transparency Tool created by the Minnesota Office of the State Auditor consolidates a variety of state and local data sources about the age, value and condition of community civil infrastructure (sewer, wastewater treatment, and drinking water) into a set of interactive maps to assist with planning needed investments.
- See the Adaptation Strategies Guide for Water Utilities which includes sustainability briefs, examples of utilities implementing adaptation options, and worksheets to help with the planning process.
- Flood Resilience - A Basic Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities lets you click on Mitigation Options for helpful checklists of low-cost to expensive mitigation options for specific assets/operations including lift stations, headworks, treatment plants, instrumentation and electrical controls, power stations, buildings (relevant for other city buildings too), and more.
- Drought Response and Recovery: A Basic Guide for Water Utilities covers staffing, response plans and funding, water supply and demand management, communication and partnerships.
Order Number
7
Action Type
Finite