Heather brings her wealth of asset management experience and expertise to Inframanage.com. She has been working in asset management throughout the United States, including US territories, for over 10 years.
Heather has a background in engineering, having earned a BS Degree in Environmental Engineering from Penn State University and an MS degree in Environmental Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She is currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program at the University of New Mexico in Civil Engineering with an Environmental emphasis. She is a registered Professional Engineer in Pennsylvania and New Mexico.
Heather’s interest in asset management came as a result of her work with water and wastewater utilities. She recognized that they were struggling to manage and pay for their assets and needed a better approach.
After learning about the success of asset management in New Zealand and Australia, she organized her own study tour and visited with many people in both countries to learn about asset management. Her interest was all levels from regulatory to operations to management to engineering.
Following her tour, she developed the first program in the U.S. for water and wastewater medium-sized management for small to medium-sized utilities. This work has evolved into an asset management manual titled, “AM KAN Work!,” which was funded by the State of Kansas (hence the “KAN” in the title) and includes video clips of water and wastewater utilities across the US discussing asset management. The clips are embedded into a document that is intended to be a self-help guide for asset management.
Heather has been training water systems in asset management for the past 8 years and has completed well over 100 trainings all across the US and has been providing direct assistance in implementing asset management to water and wastewater utilities of all sizes from a low of 50 connections up to several hundred thousand connections.
Given the lack of a mandate for asset management, Heather is particularly interested in helping systems with the motivation for doing asset management and evaluating successes with asset management. She developed an Asset Management IQ tool that assists utilities with evaluating the success of their programs.
In her spare time, Heather is also involved in strategic water loss reduction, asset management for other asset classes (including asset management for senior centers), regulatory compliance assistance for tribal drinking water assistance, and assistance to sustainable challenge grant communities.
She is also a frequent speaker at US regional and national conferences and the occasional international conference.
Know more about Heather by clicking this link: HEATHER HIMMELBERGER
[…] Waugh and Heather Himmelberger are holding another “Ask the Experts” […]