Preparing for the Worst, Expecting the Best: Removing the Guessing from Pipeline Contingency Planning and Response Strategies

摘要

Emergency Response and Contingency Planning documents are becoming a recognized part of well-run utilities, especially for water and wastewater buried and aging infrastructure. Though well-intentioned, many of these plans lack unified standards, an understanding of their usefulness and integration with other plans, or are not capable of fulfilling their intent during execution. Several documented guidance strategies exist within the water/wastewater industry and from incident response agencies, such as FEMA. This paper overviews the following: 1. Criteria for identifying infrastructure in need of a plan; 2. Recommended planning strategies; 3. Gap analysis metrics to identify common short-comings of existing emergency plans; 4. A strawman outline of a plan that satisfies emergency planning goals that can be further tested.