What Infrastructure Managers Lose When Infrastructure Fails

Now the interesting thing about that threshold of safety and trust is you can spend heaps of dollars and get your levels of service up to and get your risks back down but you never get your trust back.

So as infrastructure asset management practitioners, if you build something that fails or you have a failure sequence like that one at Flint that’s recent, once you lose your trust, so in dictatorships, if you get on the wrong side of the ruling party or whatever, and you lose their trust and you embarrass them, generally you don’t survive that process for they’ll throw you in jail for the very best.

In a western democracy, we’re quite not as harsh as that but people go to jail for things like this.

But you have legislation, you have regulations, the cost of alternative action, you have litigation, you have societal cost, and you have much more requirements to inspect and investigate.

So, in New Zealand terms, in terms of that Havelock North water incident, that has just been all of those things will come out of that.

We’ve got a commission of inquiry underway now with that report out in the middle of next year (2017).

So again, they’ve already got it back to safe (level). They had it back to safe (level) within 24 to 48 hours and knowing what was going wrong.

Winning trust back when infrastructure fails is a bigger problem.

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