Resilience of Water and Wastewater Utilities Through Disaster Preparedness and Mitigation

Building utility resilience before incidents occur through preparedness and mitigation.

On this page:

• About the Program
• Types of Assistance
• How This Program Helps Build Resilience
• Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

About the Program

The EPA supports the ability of drinking water and wastewater utilities to prepare for and withstand disruptions, deliberate attacks, accidents, and naturally occurring threats. Whether it is strengthening earthquake resilience or highlighting flood resilience, the EPA provides a broad array of tools, trainings, guides, and pilot project opportunities to build utility resilience before incidents occur through preparedness and mitigation.

Types of Assistance

This program effort offers states and utilities different types of assistance to help build utility resilience.

Technical Assistance

The EPA provides an assortment of guides and tools to help water and wastewater utilities evaluate threats from various natural disasters and build resilience through mitigation measures.

• Flood Resilience Guide—This easy-to-navigate guide helps water utilities understand local flooding threats and identify practical, cost-effective mitigation solutions to protect critical assets using worksheets, embedded videos, and example flood maps.
• Drought Response and Recovery Guide—This resource helps water utilities identify key drought preparedness and response actions to address both short-term drought impacts and long-term drought resilience. The Guide outlines essential planning considerations, including: 1) staffing, funding, and response planning; 2) water supply and demand management; and 3) communication and partnerships. The Guide also links to a GeoPlatform with a case studies map and videos that tell the story of how nine diverse small- to medium-sized water utilities across the United States were challenged by and overcame drought impacts.
• Earthquake Resilience Guide, Video, and Interactive Maps—This guide helps water and wastewater utilities understand the threats, consequences, and mitigation strategies to build resilience. The video, “Surviving the Quake,” introduces public officials to the concern for utilities. The interactive maps show threats from natural and induced earthquakes, fault, liquefaction areas, and utility examples earthquake resilience.
• Power Resilience Guide—This interactive guide assists water and wastewater utilities in identifying and implementing key actions to improve resilience to power outages through backup generators and power reliability procedures.
• Hazard Mitigation for Natural Disasters: A Starter Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities—This interactive, user-friendly guide helps utilities mitigate natural disasters (e.g., floods, earthquakes, droughts, wildfires) and connect into the community’s local mitigation plan.

Outreach and Education Assistance

• The EPA provides in-person and virtual training and workshop opportunities for water utilities to build resilience to flooding, droughts, earthquakes, and power outages.
• The EPA also provides technical expertise to individual utilities through pilot projects.

How This Program Helps Build Resilience

This program can help water and wastewater utilities address risk and damage from natural disasters (e.g., floods) and malevolent acts (e.g., cyber-attacks). The EPA’s resilience program has performed several projects and provided programmatic support for pre- and post-natural-disaster activities.

• Building Flood Resilience in New England—The states in EPA Region 1 are prone to flooding, with five major disaster declarations between 2008 and 2019. To help small utilities, the EPA conducted an innovative series of virtual workshops to provide individualized technical assistance for three to five selected utilities in each state. With such assistance, utilities evaluated the threat of flooding, identified vulnerability of assets, selected mitigation measures, and identified funding. One utility participant said, “The workshop was interactive, and I learned a lot about our flood issues. I now understand how to read FEMA flood maps. It didn’t cross my mind to check the elevations of the pump stations and look at road access issues. By listening to other utilities, I learned ways to improve the flood resilience of my utility.”
• Earthquake Resilience in the Central United States—the EPA conducted an earthquake resilience webinar series that reached over 600 water utility participants representing all eight states that constitute the New Madrid Seismic Zone. Speakers included representatives from U.S. Geological Survey, the Central United States Earthquake Consortium, state primacy agencies, and utilities that have taken steps to mitigate damage from earthquakes.
• Water-Power Workshops—the EPA has conducted numerous water-power workshops in communities around the nation to strengthen relationships between utilities and their electric providers and developed strategies for increasing their resilience to power outages.

Connections to Other EPA, Federal, or Non-Governmental Efforts

The EPA encourages utilities to engage with local emergency and local mitigation agencies to become part of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) national hazard mitigation program and for projects to be eligible for FEMA funds. These mitigation measures can be funded by various federal programs from the EPA, FEMA, U.S. Department of Agriculture, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Small Business Administration. The program description of Resilience of Water and Wastewater Utilities Through Disaster Response and Recovery has more information about tools to assist with federal mitigation funding.