Hurricane Isaac hitting the Gulf Coast in late August, and the specter of Katrina that it brought, was yet another reminder of how we are often at the mercy of the weather. Caught in a storm or any other sort of disaster, we feel it the most when we lose the essentials—electricity, access to food, and water service.
Rural communities are susceptible to disruptions in water services just like their urban counterparts. Restoring drinking water and wastewater service after a disaster can be difficult for any utility but can be especially hard for small and rural systems.
Rather than using the term disaster preparedness or readiness, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) uses the term resiliency. This term is more comprehensive and encompasses all phases of a disaster—before, during and after—and addresses ways that utilities, especially those in the water sector, can weather the storm, so to speak. It speaks about how utilities can survive disasters through reducing risks and preparing beforehand and responding and recovering in the aftermath.
Water-sector resiliency in rural areas, in both drinking water and wastewater utilities, can be hindered by lack of finances, lack of interconnections to other utilities, or even difficulty getting spare parts. Many residents and local officials also take drinking water and wastewater services for granted and believe they always can be—and will be—provided, no matter what.
Communities rely on service from their water utilities, but in the event of a disaster, the utilities are often ill-equipped to function and experience service interruptions. Improving preparedness, not only at the utility level, but also with other sectors that are dependent on community water systems, is crucial to the overall emergency and disaster resilience in every community.
This is where the principle of interdependency comes in. Most people, because of their daily habits, think only about our water utilities providing service in our homes. But there are other important components of a community, from businesses to schools to farms. One way they are linked to and dependent on each other is through water services. A hospital depends on a steady supply of clean, sanitary water to care for patients. A power plant needs water to operate, and a drinking water plant needs electricity to operate, which is a true interdependency. If water services are interrupted at any of these entities, their operations start to break down fairly quickly. Trucking in water or relying on bottled water can be costly and isn’t always feasible.
EPA is helping the water sector and the communities it serves improve overall preparedness through better understanding of interdependencies among sectors and by supporting local preparedness efforts. Other sectors include health care providers, emergency responders and industrial operations.
In one case, EPA provided subject-matter experts to support a workshop held in May 2012 in St. Clair County, Mich. Below are some of the many lessons the county learned through its efforts—lessons that can help other communities increase their water preparedness.
St. Clair County water-resiliency roundtable
The St. Clair County Homeland Security – Emergency Management (HSEM) Office, in collaboration with EPA, conducted a roundtable workshop to discuss water security. This workshop helped prepare the county’s drinking water and wastewater utilities, as well as the broader community, for possible interruptions in water service.
The day-long event brought together water utilities and local elected and appointed officials, emergency managers, members of the business community, and residents to talk about emergency preparedness. A primary focus was on helping participants understand the water utilities’ operations, capabilities during a disaster, and impacts on the community should service be disrupted. Participants then discussed what actions and resources were necessary to respond to and recover from a future water emergency.
Together drinking water and wastewater utilities provide a critical public service to their communities. Just as each community is unique, each water system is also unique. Utility owners and operators, in collaboration with members of their community, are in the best position to know what preparedness activities will best meet their needs. To develop a sound preparedness plan, communities need to bring together all major stakeholders in the community that could be affected during an interruption in service.
St. Clair County brought together 40 representatives of essential community services, as well as state and federal agencies, to discuss their critical water interdependencies. Participants represented water utilities, public works departments, public health agencies, school districts, and emergency services/first responders. The strong local presence was supplemented by state- and federal-level officials to produce a diverse yet focused group that was able to discuss their respective roles and responsibilities during a disaster. They were also able to identify gaps in emergency plans and determine what resources might be needed during a water emergency.
After a series of informational briefings, St. Clair County separated participants into smaller discussion groups based on their sectors. For example, groups were created for water utilities, critical water users, first responders, and emergency-management officials.
Groups reviewed scenarios describing utility disruptions of three days and three weeks and discussed how each of their facilities or organizational operations would be impacted. Scenario details were designed to be vague so participants focused on their actions during the scenario rather than on the cause of the incident. This was important because water-service interruptions can have many causes—natural or human. The focus of the workshop was preparing for any interruption in service, whether from drought, hurricane, flood, or an accidental or deliberate contamination.
The exercise allowed each group to better understand how a sector would be impacted in the event of a water-service interruption, what members of a sector could do to reduce negative impacts, and what support they could reasonably expect from others in their community. The workshop helped participants identify both quick fixes and longer-term ideas to increase resiliency. Participants also drafted recommended follow-up action items they believed would help their community better prepare for and respond to a water-sector emergency.
The availability of resources is important in a recovery but is only one part of what makes a community resilient. Communities also need an intangible but vital part—being prepared and able to react decisively to an unexpected disaster.
The value of bringing together representatives of different sectors in a community to work on relationships cannot be overlooked. One advantage rural communities have lies in their ability to communicate quickly and easily across different community organizations, which is something that can be challenging in larger communities.
Hosting community discussions before disasters strike can help establish relationships that can prove invaluable in times of crisis and result in more efficient and effective response and recovery actions.
What you can do in your community
You can start by assessing your community’s state of preparedness. As noted above, rural communities can be challenged to respond to water-service interruptions for many reasons. To gain a better understanding of your community’s strengths and weaknesses, you can use EPA’s Community-Based Water Resiliency (CBWR) electronic tool.
The CBWR tool helps users understand the interdependencies between the water and other sectors, assess their community’s current resiliency to water-service interruptions, and find specific tools and resources to fill their preparedness gaps. With more than 400 resources available in the toolbox, users have access to the most appropriate tools and resources based on their unique characteristics, including size, location and stakeholder type. Each participant in the St. Clair County workshop left the meeting committed to completing the CBWR self-assessment as an initial step in preparing for a water-related emergency.
The CBWR tool will be updated soon to contain a new tool for hosting a roundtable workshop in your community. The Water Resiliency Action Plan, or WRAP Kit, guides users through a step-by-step process of hosting a water-emergency roundtable similar to the one in St. Clair County. The WRAP Kit offers suggestions on potential planning-team members and invitees as well as sample invitations, presentations, registration forms, after-action reports, and other important meeting materials. The kit is a one-stop-shop with everything you need to develop and host a water emergency-planning meeting in your community.
St. Clair County improved its water resiliency by hosting a roundtable discussion. Encouraging your community to do the same by bringing together the right people can greatly increase your ability to plan for and recover from a disaster in the most efficient and effective ways possible.
If you are interested in hosting a water emergency meeting in your community or would like to learn more about other EPA efforts to improve water security and resiliency, visit the Community-Based Water Resiliency website at http://water.epa.gov/infrastructure/watersecurity/communities/index.cfm [1] or contact us at: WSD_Outreach@epa.gov [2]. To download the CBWR tool, go to http://yosemite.epa.gov/ow/SReg.nsf/description/CBWR_e-tool [3]
This is your community.
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 To discover how real an emergency without water can get, consider these questions, which are related to some disaster scenarios presented in the Community-Based Water Resiliency (CBWR) electronic tool (see main article). These questions point to the intricate ways that water is linked to other parts of a community and vice versa:
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Other articles in this issue:
- Director's Letter [4]
- Rural Developments [5] (news briefs)
- The presidential candidates and rural America [6]
- Report: Aging infrastructure, capital costs and funding top concerns for U.S. water utility leaders [7]
- New study describes challenges and ways to strengthen rural communities in Appalachia [8]
- Guest editorial: Managing our finite water resources [9]