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Best Practices for Delivering Clean Water in a Changing World
Clean water is essential for human health and well-being, and climate change, among many other issues, has increasingly become a threat to the availability of this vital resource. This article will provide a comprehensive assessment of best practices for delivering...
Tracking Water Risk Under ESG Exercises
As more corporations focus on tracking their Environmental Sustainability and Governance performance, there is a need to understand what needs to be understood when it comes to water risk. The details included in the ESG factors focused on water may vary depending on...
Do I Have Lead Service Lines In My City?
While the information is still being gathered to accurately map lead service lines in cities - and there is no real-time lead monitoring technology on the market yet - here are several tools and resources that provide information on lead service line data. Some of...
How To Manage City Assets During A Water Emergency
In times of crisis, being able to continue operations and manage working infrastructure is vital. This is especially true during a water emergency, where the availability of clean drinking water is a major concern for local governments and citizens alike. The...
The Role Of The Private Sector In Addressing The Water Crisis
Based on research by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), it is estimated that by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population could be living under water-stressed conditions. These conditions arose from increased global population, pollution (untreated human waste, use of...
Addressing the Water Crisis, Decarbonization and Sustainability.
The world is in the midst of a climate crisis, and the time for action is now, not tomorrow. The Paris Agreement of 2015 set an ambitious goal of limiting global warming to well below two degrees Celsius (2°C) (1.5°C/2.7°F to be exact), but the world is still on track...
Water In The World 05/03/23
Top 7 weekly updates on water, infrastructure and technology. Europe’s Next Issue: Water. And it’s all about our poor resource management approaches. Managing Water Risk is the next big business opportunity and The Industrial Emissions Directive (EU) should aid that...
What Is The Difference (Between Water Industry Words/Phrases)?
We hear some water industry phrases and it's become clear to us that there is a need to make it clear that, while some things are similar in the underlying value they serve or problem they serve, there is some difference to how they should be viewed. For example,...
A Quick Primer on Water Industry Terms And Their Meanings.
There are thousands of terms and esoteric framings in the water industry. As the industry works to attract the required number of new talent (the industry is facing ~30% attrition within the technician rank) making the terms more accessible is necessary. So here we...
AI for Energy Optimization in Water Systems
In engineering consulting, the paradigm of manual optimization has long been the gold standard for designing energy-efficient water systems. As project managers, we've been conditioned to meticulously adjust parameters, run complex simulations, and utilize years of...
Water In The World 01/05/23
Top 5 weekly updates on water, infrastructure and technology. US Justice Department sues city of Jackson over water crisis, (Guardian) the people continue to wait for a resolution The Top 10 Global Risks of 2023 (TIME): Hint, water is on the list. 2022 was the year...
Resilience and AWIA 2018: Why being prepared isn’t enough
As incidents of floods increase and as the intensity of droughts deepen, water systems will need to ramp up their ability to adapt to evolving system conditions in real-time. Water systems need to become adaptive. Water systems need to become resilient. But the...
What the SCOTUS Decision on EPA Means for Clean Water
As I read news of SCOTUS’ weakening the ability of the EPA to curb power plant emissions I could only think of the implications - directly and indirectly - on the water utility sector. I could only think of the impact and risk to our already fragile water systems. For...
What We Learned at AWWA’s ACE22 Conference
Conference season over the last few months was revealing both for the lessons learned from conversations with water industry professionals and for how relieved everyone in the industry seemed to be at having live events once again. While COVID-related safety protocols...
How to Forecast the Future as a Water Utility Executive
How can a water system's public works director or operations manager look to the future and plan for risks? How does one, entrusted with the responsibility of ensuring clean water is provided to the residents of their region, deliver on their promise? How might they...
Climate Change + Poor Infrastructure + Failure to Plan = Disasters
Most assessments of the Texas outage of 2021 point to a few factors that were responsible for the loss of power and water that hit ~4.2M Texas residents Old Infrastructure and asset degradationLack of a shared and accepted plan to address (what was an expected)...
The Problem with Data Silos in Water Utilities and Why You Must Fix It
If there’s anything we know about the way modern organizations work, it’s that the flow of information is critical. Businesses need external customer information to flow in to help them determine what their customers’ needs or issues are, so they can be addressed...
Climate Change Is Worsening Our Water Quality.
Even as carbon mitigation actions gain steam, water continues to be ignored in our climate change mitigation. While we experience climate change impacts through water - floods, droughts - the conversation never covers the impact on water quality. I won’t bury the lede...
Why On-Premise Solutions No Longer Make Sense For Water Systems
In earlier days of software technology deployment to water utilities, vendors pushed for on-premise storage of data and technological tools (even software). Servers were deployed to give the engineers at the water utility a sense that their data was ‘secure’ and...
Biden’s Splashing The Cash. Here’s How We Spend It To Secure Water’s Future.
Drinking Water Policy Recommendations for the Biden Administration Water management is highly regulated and for good reason. When the appropriate guard rails and laws are not in place, citizens get unchecked pollution in their drinking water or overconsumption of...
Climate Change + Poor Infrastructure + Failure to Plan = Disasters
In the midst of the worst climate change-induced disaster in the US state of Texas, we are resorting to doing the things we seem to be most adept at doing these days; blaming, shaming and, misinforming. Instead of rushing to provide help and assistance to the people...
What Are The (non-COVID) Changes Impacting Drinking Water Systems?
To say 2020 brought change to the water sector is an understatement. Increased adoption of technology, further attrition in the technician and engineer ranks, new processes and decreased revenue as a result of COVID. At the beginning of Q2 2020, we wrote about our...
Who Has Time To Improve Water Quality?
In walking, eating lunch with, and talking to water system managers and operators there is one thing that has come to the surface as the real problem they have. Actually, it became more obvious because of how difficult it is to get to talk to water system operators...
An Alternative Approach to Dealing with the Retiring 30% of the Water Workforce
It is not news to anyone who is involved in the utility industry that the workforce is retiring at a rate that the utility is unable to replace. In the water industry, it is projected that 30% of the workforce will be retiring over the next few years. According...
Pandemics, Plans, Perceptions
Say what you will, and I’m not discussing the politics of this situation we find ourselves in with the pandemic, the prevailing facts suggest that we did not have a plan to fight COVID19. Or any pandemic. Those same facts also suggest that our systems – public health,...
The (Near) Future of Water
COVID Highlights Some Issues There are a few issues that water systems are having to deal with in the midst of the COVID pandemic. These issues aren’t particularly new, COVID19 has just highlighted difficulties the industry was already facing and might have been...
Is There a Role for 5G in the Water Utility Industry?
In capturing data within the distribution edge of water utilities, through sensors or probes, some of the difficulties we hear from operations folk at these utilities include: The data transmission issues that lead to lost data or incomplete data which impacts the...
Building the Water Utility of the Future
As the sources of water continue to become scarce - especially with the rise in populations, urban growth and climate change - the water utility's role in ensuring people get potable water becomes ever more critical. Because, fundamentally, the water provision in...