Speaking

ECWA serves the greater Buffalo, New York, region with wholesale and retail water service. Its mission is “to provide all of its customers a plentiful supply of safe, high quality and affordable drinking water through reliable infrastructure.” ECWA fulfills its mission in part by managing over 3,000 miles of watermains at a high level of reliability.

In 2024, ECWA advanced its watermain risk management practices by adopting an AI-powered watermain break prediction and replacement planning tool. To better understand the overall risks of pipe failures, ECWA also advanced its methodology for estimating the consequences of failure (COF) of watermain breaks to create monetized, triple-bottom line (TBL) risk costs associated with every pipe. Advanced understanding of risk values improved the prioritization of watermain replacements and the determination of budgets for replacements to achieve level-of-service goals for water reliability.

This presentation focuses on the development of monetized TBL COF values - more specifically on the use of water hydraulic modeling tools and to estimate the monetized social impacts on customers based on a loss of service to perform a watermain break repair.

While the direct financial cost of watermain failures is well understood by utilities, there are ancillary social impacts that can be substantially higher than direct utility costs. COF can skyrocket if service interruptions impact critical customers and large users, and understanding the magnitude of those impacts can have a significant impact on which pipes are prioritized for replacement.

ECWA and its consulting team developed comprehensive TBL COF values for a variety of critical customer types (e.g., hospitals, dialysis centers, nursing homes, schools, prisons). Then, using its WaterGEMS hydraulic model, ECWA iteratively broke each individual pipe and modeled the impacts to all customers if those pipes were isolated for repairs. Some suffered complete loss of service while others experienced consumption loss – the model simulated both scenarios, and monetized costs were assigned accordingly.

This presentation will share how the team also modeled the beneficial impacts of risk mitigations, such as distribution system looping, multiple service connections to a critical customer and emergency connections across typically isolated pressure districts. 

Finally, ECWA asked its consulting team to automate many of the processes used to develop the hydraulic COF values so that they could be updated periodically, allowing for updates to the watermain replacement program. Scripts were developed to automate the updating of COF factors, and an SOP was created for ECWA to run the hydraulic consequence analysis on their own in the future.

This workshop provides exercises with basic and advanced physical condition assessment frameworks to experience the pros and cons and help decide what is appropriate for their utility. The hands-on use of predictive maintenance tools helps de-mystify these burgeoning technologies that reduce maintenance costs, improve safety and reduce CIP budgets by extending the life of existing assets.