Conversations on Strategy Podcast – Ep 12 – Steve Bieber – “Water Sector Resilience in the Metropolitan Washington Case” from Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense CISR (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1)

In most urbanized societies, water is taken for granted and little thought is given to how fragile the supply of this vital resource can be. A water emergency, however, such as a treatment plant outage, a water source contamination event, or natural disaster has the potential for significant disruption to society and the infrastructure that depends on water to function. Most other sectors of critical infrastructure, as well as activities of daily living, are highly dependent on the water sector. As a result, consequences of a water emergency can be significant and may occur immediately without notice depending on the nature of the event. Thus, the security and resilience of the water sector is a key component of a nation’s civil preparedness that can have military and international implications as well. Terrorist threats to water delivery or contamination of water sources as a terrorist act can impact a nation’s ability to move and sustain its military forces and project military power when required. From the perspective of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), threats to the water sector in one member state could have ripple effects that limit or diminish NATO’s military mobility and force projection in support of its essential core tasks.

Therefore, it is important to understand water sector risks and find ways to effectively mitigate them. While this chapter focuses on the US water sector and uses a case study from one of its most important metropolitan areas, the chapter provides a helpful framework for other Allies and partners to understand, adapt, and employ to their specific circumstances.

This podcast based on Chapter 8 in Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1) provides a foundation from which to better understand the criticality of water sector resilience. While this chapter focuses on the US water sector and uses a case study from one of its most important metropolitan areas, the chapter provides a helpful framework for other Allies and partners to understand, adapt, and employ to their specific circumstances.

Watch the webinar: https://youtu.be/G1OD24HEh94

Read the book: https://press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs/955/

Keywords: critical infrastructure, crisis management, security risk assessment, water sector resilience

Episode Transcript:

“Water Sector Resilience in the Metropolitan Washington Case” from Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency (NATO COE-DAT Handbook 1)

Stephanie Crider (Host)

You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.

Conversations on strategy welcomes Steve Bieber, author of “Water Sector Resilience in the Metropolitan Washington Case.” Bieber has more than 30 years of experience in leading development and reform and water security, public policy, and environmental regulation. He’s currently the water resources program director for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

Welcome to Conversations on Strategy, Steve. Thanks for joining me today. You recently contributed to the book Enabling NATO’s Collective Defense: Critical Infrastructure Security and Resiliency. Your chapter is about water sector resilience. Give us an overview of the water sector, please.

Steve Bieber

Sure, so thanks for having me on. You know, water includes both water you drink and (water) you use for bathing and cooking and so on. But obviously when you’re done doing all of that stuff, it has to go somewhere—which is down the drain and to a wastewater treatment plant. But probably the other part that folks don’t think about a whole lot is the source of the water in the first place. When you think of the water system and working with water utilities, usually the three biggest components are the source of it, collection and treatment of that, distributing it, and then treatment at the end when you’re done using the water.

Just to give folks a little bit of perspective, here in the Metro Washington region, the average daily demand for drinking water (and it goes up and down depending on the time of year) is close to 500 million gallons a day. We’ve got over 14, 500 miles of water mains (so that’s more than the miles of roads we have in the region) and almost 120,000 fire hydrants. So if you ever think about the challenge of maintaining something like that … you know, and over 1,000,000 metered accounts and a little more than 5 million people who are served by public water and sewer.

Host

Talk to me about the risks and threats of the water sector.

Bieber

You know, I’m sure people have seen in the news lately—especially with what happened in North Carolina (electrical substation attack in Moore County on December 3, 2022)—you know, a lot of terrorism and Black Sky events are in the news. Those things can be a threat to the water sector as well. So there’s physical security threats like that but also things like climate change, rising sea level, aging infrastructure, you know. We have some infrastructure here in the Metro Washington region that dates back to the 1800s, and there are instances that sometimes they find pipes made out of wood when they’re doing main break repair.

You can imagine trying to keep up with operations maintenance. And just repairing things like that over such a vast network is pretty hard. And so, from the utility perspective, you’re dealing with all sorts of threats. You know, natural threats, man-made threats, accidents that happen (whether it’s a contractor striking a pipe and breaking it or an oil spill in your source water, all sorts of things) and you have to be prepared to deal with all of it.

Host

Speaking of dealing with it, what are the key steps in resiliency planning?

Bieber

Sure, so I’ll start out maybe by saying a little bit about what resiliency is. So for the water sector, broadly, you can define it as the ability for a water utility to maintain their operations despite a challenge like, say, a water main break, and recover from the event as soon as possible. And we already talked about the stressors. Whether it’s weather, accidents, or some kind of intentional act, the idea is to be able to bounce back as quickly as you can.

The other thing to be mindful of is resilience extends beyond just the utility and encompasses dependent and interdependent sectors, so things like the energy sector, health care. A big one in our region here is data centers, which are very dependent on water for cooling. All those local and regional assets are connected. And sometimes seemingly distant threats to resilience in another region can affect utilities here. So, for example, a spill in West Virginia could affect our water supply here in Metro DC, just as one example. And a lot of times these cross-sector dependencies are deep and complex, so it’s really important to think about those when you’re looking at doing resiliency planning.

So here in the Metro Washington region, we actually do studies routinely to look at things like adequacy of our water and wastewater infrastructure to meet demand. So say we’re forecasting out to 2050. Do we have enough treatment? Enough distribution? Enough collection system to meet growing population and employment and all of that?

We’ve historically looked at things like drought, which we know happens from time to time. And we do studies on that every five years to see do we have adequate infrastructure in place to be resilient against the drought of record. But one thing we decided to do a few years ago is expand that and take more of a system resiliency approach to look at other threats and hazards, not just drought, and see where we maybe have vulnerabilities and also see where we could make investments to buy down the risk from certain threats.

So we got some federal grant money to do that. And let’s say you could kind of break down the steps into five phases. So, the first one was data collection and establishing system capabilities. So that was working with all the water utilities in our region. We held a series of workshops and determined, sort of, what do you have in terms of water treatment? Where do you get your source water from? How much distribution capacity do you have? Collect that all into one database, so we have a good baseline of what’s the capability that we have now. And then the second step was establishing a risk framework and defining a level of service. So basically, thinking about different failures events, how likely are they to happen, and what level of service do we want to have in the event that those things did happen? That’s really an important driver because I’ve seen utilities that use as their level of service in an emergency one gallon per person per day. I’ve seen others that have planned around 20 percent of your average daily demand. So as an example, if the average household uses 100 gallons a day, being able to provide 20 gallons a day, well, that’s 20 times more than one gallon.

We used here, for our planning purposes, Average Winter Day demand, which would be even more than that. So as you can imagine, when things are changing by 20 times or 30 times, you’re planning assumption the capability you need to have to meet that demand is going to be vastly different, too. So once you’ve defined, you know kind of your level of ...