In keeping with its newly adopted Water Conservation and Drought Contingency Plan, the Village of Lumby introduced a Stage-1 Water Conservation threshold that instituted water sprinkling regulations, a public education awareness program, and increased water-level monitoring for village wells.
Over the last few years, upgrades to intake screening facilities and pressure reducing stations in the District of Lake Country have increased efficiency and safety, which has allowed operators to meet the new demands with no net increase in staff. To continue this trend, the district has begun a program of integrating and automating operation facilities.
Naramata residents have seen considerable activity on their water system since construction began in February. Work is well underway on two contracts.
The Black Mountain Irrigation District (BMID) provides domestic water to 20,000 people and irrigation water to 4,100 acres of agriculture on the east benchlands of Kelowna. BMID draws from Mission Creek, which is the most significant creek feeding Okanagan Lake.
Before interacting with the media, water system professionals should learn and practice a few rules for effectively communicating risk to the public.
Equity has long been an important principle of utility rate design, but until now no measure of rate equity has been developed and applied systematically to municipal water rate structures.
There are three areas that utilities should address to improve their financial strength: financial planning and management, effective pricing, and affordability. This article discusses these areas, as well as their benefit and importance in encouraging effective planning and preparation for utilities to meet future challenges.
Industry studies in recent years have raised awareness of the magnitude of asset renewal and replacement needs in the water industry, but little comparative work has been done on asset management. To help fill this gap, the AWWA Research Foundation sponsored the study summarized in this article.
Faced by the need to repair and replace aging infrastructure and at the same time build new systems to meet population growth, water utilities must make increasingly complex decisions about where, when, and how to invest their capital improvement dollars. What's more, their decisions must involve a range of stakeholders and win their “buy-in” in order for projects to receive necessary financial and community support.
Technology will transform the water utility workplace—from how utilities manage and use information to how they treat and monitor water. Understanding the nature of these changes and the appropriate use of technology can reduce costs, allow for better and quicker decision-making, and enable better management of increasingly complex information databases.
