Water Treatment Resilience Project Phase II, Northern Ireland Water – UK

Building on the success of Phase I of the Water Treatment Resilience Project, in late 2015, Northern Ireland Water (NI Water) commissioned Phase II.

Phase II had two main objectives:

Expansion of the 10 initial critical plant O&M manuals to all 19 NI Water treatment plants.
Review of alignment of NI Water resilience processes to regulatory requirements and bench-marking of implemented methodology against UK water industry best and current practice.

Whilst RPS delivered the remaining plant O&M manuals, Battus focussed on the higher level second objective, with a detailed review of:

the various regulatory frameworks across the various UK water service providers, and how the issue of resilience is being addressed with these frameworks; and
the resilience methodologies of 6 carefully-selected public and privately-owned UK water service providers.

A subsidiary objective was to identify whether the particular ownership structure and/or business model of the water service providers had any discernable effect on the overall philosophy and approach to resilience, or its detailed delivery.

The findings were broadly that:

Integration between long term asset resilience (20+ year time horizon) and short term operational resilience (incident management and business continuity methodologies) was not strong; and
Much of what was in place was directed at deploying physical resources to keep customers in water via alternative supply methods.(e.g. tankering, temporary overland pipes etc) rather than strategies to address missing human or physical resources.

There appeared to be little or no impact of different ownership structures or business models on resilience approaches as the influence of (a) regulatory agencies [over the longer term] and (b) customer expectations for continuous supply [in the short term] seemed to drive resilience methodologies to a far greater extent.

The final report for NI Water suggested how both longer term asset and water resource planning and shorter term network development and incident management activities could be integrated into a common theme of resilience.