Strategies to Keep the Taps Running, Whatever Happens

Climate change is just one more factor making the unpredictable world of fresh water supply and demand even more uncertain. Dr Sarah Cotterill is interested in finding ways of ensuring continuity of supply when, not if, water systems fail. Despite everyone’s best efforts this will happen, she says, possibly resulting from two or more things occurring at the same time or in swift succession. “That’s where resilience comes into play.” The arrival of just such an event, the COVID pandemic, provided her and a team of researchers from Ireland and the UK with the opportunity to examine how well existing water company risk management strategies performed in response to the challenges presented by a high impact, unpredictable threat. This information is of immense value in helping the water industry and policymakers devise better, more adaptable, approaches to risk management in an increasingly uncertain world.

“Every year water companies prepare for potential threats and make new drought and water resource management plans.”

Resilience Makes Systems “Safe to Fail”

For Dr Sarah Cotterill, Assistant Professor of Civil Engineering, the COVID pandemic provided a rare opportunity to progress her research interest in the resilience of water services in both the UK and Ireland.

This particular piece of COVID-related research was conceived in March 2020 when Dr Cotterill and a colleague the University of Exeter’s Centre for Water Systems, Dr Peter Melville-Shreeve, recognised the major implications that sudden changes in work practices caused by the lockdown would have for the providers of an essential service such as water. The unexpected nature of this event was of particular importance from their perspective.

“We’re interested in the resilience of water systems, how they respond to failure,”

Dr Cotterill explains. “Sometimes when people talk about resilience they really mean reliability – how to ensure that failures don’t occur. There is always merit in taking appropriate steps to prevent failure, that’s a first line of defence for any system.

“However, there’s also a need to accept that, despite everyone’s best efforts, failures will occur that have the potential to disrupt a system. This may result from possibly two or more things happening at the same time or in swift succession. That’s where resilience comes into play. Our interest is in how a system can be made ‘safe to fail’, that there’s enough capacity to continue service provision even Strategies to Keep the Taps Running, Whatever Happens Dr Sarah Cotterill UCD School of Civil Engineering “Every year water companies prepare for potential threats and make new drought and water resource management plans.”

You can read the full case study here: Strategies to Keep the Taps Running, Whatever Happens