Richmond, Virginia has had a fair amount of problems with its water mains recently which has led the city to debate whether they should or shouldn’t boil their water.
Their outdated combined sewer overflow system is constantly keeping residents guessing as to how much waste the city is dumping in the river.
The problem with combined sewer overflow systems is that they channel stormwater and raw sewage together in certain situations.
Many older cities in the USA are working on updating these combined systems due to the problems they create, including Richmond.
RVA News reports why:
“Bob Steidel assured me that, “All cities that have combined sewers are in the process of doing one of two things: either we’re eliminating them altogether or we’re treating the water in a modern water plant. We’re going to capture it and treat it. We started this project back in the 80s, and we’re about halfway done at this point. We’ve spent a little over 500 million dollars and have 750 million dollars to go.”
In the meantime, “there are still regular flood/rain events that overwhelm the city’s system, which ends up releasing large quantities of untreated sewage into the James River–notably, around 14th St in Shockoe Bottom,” says Chapman.
Though Steidel says that the city is working as hard as it can (spending between 10 and 20 million dollars each year), the key to reducing this output is simply using less water. “Everyone is going to zero discharge. We need to be able to reuse everything and use as little possible and not put everything back simply into the river, but reuse and recycle everything in a big loop. The water that you drink would become the water of waste, which would become the water that you drink again. The ultimate in efficiency would be to close that loop and simply use that resource over and over again.”
This is a good example of a city that has recognized and addressed its water problems well in advance. They know what they need to do and they have set about achieving this.
Whilst they may not think of it as such, Richmond is practicing infrastructure asset management.
They understand the service levels they are aiming to reach, they have analyzed their future demands, they know their risks – including license and environmental risks, they understand the lifecycle of their assets, and they have put in place a multiyear funded program to resolve the issues, and update their assets to meet the required service levels.
As the article referenced above notes, Richmond is planning to spend over $1 billion to resolve these issues, but not just in one or two years.
The key is they have had this program in place since the ’80s and are coming up to halfway through the program. The rate they are progressing at makes it affordable and achievable.
If your infrastructure renewal or rehabilitation program is planned and then implemented over a twenty, thirty or forty year period, then it will be very affordable and very achievable at optimal cost and resource deployment.
One of the key concepts to infrastructure asset management is not leaving utilities not maintained for so long that they become a massive crisis that needs a hugely expensive short-term, high effort intervention.
Simply because it is not very good practice, and it is certainly not the way to deliver long-term optimal value.
Richmond, by contrast, provides a good example of the value in an incremental approach.
PHOTO AND CAPTION CREDIT: Will Fisher via Flickr Creative Commons License.
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