RISK-BASED MAINTENANCE OF PHYSICAL ASSETS OF WATER INFRASTRUCTURE: A CASE STUDY OF A MUNICIPALITY

摘要

South Africa is experiencing serious challenges with regards to access to sustainable basic services, ensuring and maintaining service quality such as drinking water quality, wastewater management, as well as water-use efficiency. The main challenge to delivering these services is a maintenance backlog due to a lack of implementation of infrastructure asset management within municipalities and water utilities. The current reactive management approach was deemed unsustainable due to the high cost of emergency repairs and due to increasing customer and regulatory pressures. This relates to ineffective water infrastructure management (existing infrastructure), poor planning for new infrastructure and very importantly poor infrastructure asset management (life-cycle management). This research paper is aimed at introducing a methodology towards the successful implementation of infrastructure asset management within South African water & wastewater organisations in public sector. It focuses on the case study of Municipality X. This paper contains findings that form a baseline of the status quo of infrastructure management challenges, maintenance strategies and perceived benefits of a Risk-Based Maintenance approach.